Tamar (15 page)

Jaap Smedts surprised Tamar by laughing and slapping his knee. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s very good. I’ll remember that.”

“It’s not only good; it’s true. It’s the simple truth about war. The survivors win. I can see no point in dead people being liberated.”

The pastor cleared his throat. He had something to say on that subject. But Johan the communist beat him to it.

“This is all very interesting,” he said, “but we cannot make decisions as a group until we actually
are
a group. Which we are not. We are several groups. If we agree to become a single organization called the BS, then we can act — or not act — together. But we have not yet agreed to unite under the command of the BS.”

“So let’s take a vote on it,” Felix suggested. “Or is that a bit too democratic for you chaps?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Lydia said. “The KP is a collective. Johan and myself are here as its representatives, not its leaders. We cannot cast a vote on a matter of such importance without consulting our comrades.”

Tamar looked up at the one window that illuminated the room. It was small and bullet-shaped, crisscrossed with bars of lead, and the light within it was flat and metallic. He had a long way to go. He thought about lost souls gathering at a dark river. He thought of Marijke, how beautiful her body was inside her shapeless clothes.

It was the third Sunday in the month, so the parish curate had walked out to the asylum — the Germans had taken his bike, and he damned them to hell for it — to hold a morning service. In the kitchen, thawing his hands around his cup, he inhaled and said, “Sister Agatha, this is real tea! Incredible! I know better than to ask where you got it.”

“It fell from the sky,” Agatha told him, quite truthfully.

“Ah,” the curate said. “Great is the power of prayer.”

They gathered in the dayroom. The hymn singing was ragged, to say the least, which is not unusual when some members of a congregation are singing to tunes known only to themselves. Dart did not sing. He was completely tone-deaf. When he could not avoid situations involving singing, he opened and closed his mouth silently, out of consideration for others. Albert Veening spotted him doing it and grinned across at him.

When most of the worshippers were seated, the curate gave a short sermon. He took his text, he told them, from Saint Mark’s Gospel: “If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” He had a good deal to say about the perils of division at a time “when this, our house, our nation, is still besieged by the powers of darkness.” There were some groans of alarm from his audience. And, the curate said, there were other kinds of division. Perhaps most dangerous of all was the divided self, in which the force of good and the force of evil were equally powerful, where love and death were locked in never-ending battle, when mind and soul were torn and sundered. Dart thought that this was an insensitive choice of topic, given the state of the congregation. He drifted a little — he hadn’t had much sleep — so he didn’t quite catch the bit about the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which makes us whole.

They spoke the Lord’s Prayer, then sat more or less quietly while Sidona recited it a second time, her upturned face clenched in concentration. The curate blessed them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and Dart wondered how much ahead of schedule he could arrive at the farm without it seeming . . . odd.

For as long as Marijke could remember, the house had grown smaller for the winter. When the ploughing was finished, or just after. Her grandparents had called the parlour and the sitting room “the summer rooms,” although traces of darkness lingered among the glum furniture even in sun-dazed August, when baffled flies fumbled at the windows. There had always been that ritual moment in autumn when Oma removed the wedges that held the doors to those rooms open; she would stand with her hand on the brass doorknob and look into each room, and sigh and then close the door. Winter. The sad clack of a lock. The retreat into the warm kitchen, the gathering in to the wintering heart of the house.

Marijke had done that to herself, a year ago. Tamar had left in autumn, and she had closed her doors. Then she and Oma had busied themselves with the seasonal work. They had packed potatoes gently into sacks, layered carrots and beetroot with sand in the big wooden boxes in the cellar. They had gathered mushrooms and dried them above the stove, where they curled into themselves like human ears. They had picked and bottled blackberries and bilberries from the heath, purpling their fingers and lips. Marijke had cycled to town and bought — a miracle, this — a block of sugar the size of a small loaf. She had wrapped it in a cloth and hammered it to pieces on the washhouse floor and used it to make jam from the last crop of damsons.

All of it, the gathering and preserving and storing away, was to insist that a future existed and that somehow they would reach it and live in it. And Marijke could not quite believe this, nor want it. Not back then, not in the silent house where even the most familiar things — a chair, a cup, her bed — filled her with an unbearable sense of his absence. She had lived the year numb and mechanical, waiting to heal.

Yet despite everything — to spite her, even — the slow wheel of the seasons had revolved once more. Now, on this cold Sunday, with the easterly wind whirlpooling in the yard, she and Oma were again busy with preserving pans and glass jars, investing all over again in a future. This time, though, she wanted it, and wanted to believe in it.

And because of this she was afraid. Tamar had left for Apeldoorn the previous day, cycling away from her up the track with his left arm held high in a long farewell. Exactly —
exactly
— as he had done a year earlier, a brief six hours after the signal from London. This dreadful overlapping of then and now had frightened her so badly that her legs had lost their strength; she couldn’t have run after him.

They were cutting the bruised flesh from windfall apples. Later they would stew them and store them in jars sealed with a thin layer of wax. She cut through an apple that seemed unspoiled but found that something had burrowed to the core. Some tiny thing, some worm, had left a thin black tunnel that her knife had sliced in two.

When she heard the tinny chirrup of the bicycle bell, she thought — just for two heartbeats — that it might be him. “A week,” he’d said. “Maybe a bit less.” But all the same, perhaps . . . Then she looked at the clock and remembered.

She opened the door just as Dart raised his fist to knock. They both laughed a little awkwardly. She put her hands on his arms and kissed him lightly on both cheeks. This seemed to surprise him; he even stumbled slightly in the dark hallway.

“My God, it’s cold,” was the first thing he managed to say. The wind had brought tears to the corners of his eyes.

“Your face is like ice,” she said. “Come into the kitchen and get warm.”

Oma had already shifted the kettle onto the hottest part of the stove, and now she came and kissed him too, pulling on the lapels of his coat to bring his face down to hers.

“It smells wonderful in here,” Dart said. “Apples, bread . . . and what’s that other smell? Blackberries? You’re very busy.”

“It’s an important time of year for us,” Marijke said. “A lot depends on it. Especially this year. I don’t imagine there’ll be much to buy in town this winter. The Germans will take everything before we can get near it.”

Oma put three cups of tea on the table and then acted something out, her head drawn back into her shoulders, making herself furtive.

Marijke translated. “Oma says that this year we will have to hide our food in different places all over the farm too. In case the German thieves come again.”

Dart turned sharply to look at her. “Again? They’ve been here before?”

“Just once. Early in the year.”

“And you’re expecting them to come back?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know what to expect. For all we know, the next soldiers who knock at the door might be Americans.”

He had a sudden vision of Marijke opening the door to a smiling American GI, embracing him. He blinked and it was gone. “That would be nice,” he said. “God, I can hardly bend my fingers around this cup. They’d better thaw out. I can’t send Morse with these claws.”

“They’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ve got nearly an hour before your schedule, is that right?”

“Ah, yes. You don’t mind me getting here a bit early, do you?”

“Of course not. Don’t be daft. Anyway, the good thing about that room in the little barn is that it hardly ever gets really cold. I used to spend hours up there when I was a kid.”

When he had gathered up his bag and coat, she followed him to the door. In the hall she said, “Tamar got off okay, by the way.”

“Ah, right,” Dart said. “I was going to ask.”

Operation Pegasus began a week later. Early in the morning of Sunday 22nd October, small groups of British soldiers began to emerge from their hiding places in the Veluwe. In borrowed civilian clothing they crept from woodsheds, chicken runs, cellars, a cemetery, a church. They followed their Dutch guides — many of them women and children — south, towards the Rhine. Not all could walk unaided.

On that same morning, two platoons of the German Wehrmacht arrived noisily in the village of Bennekom, west of Arnhem. When a large enough number of inhabitants had been herded together, the German officer in charge stood on top of his armoured car and told them that they had two hours to get their stuff together and leave. The village was being evacuated. It would be considered officially empty at eleven o’clock. He didn’t actually say that Bennekom would be smashed and burned at five minutes past eleven, but the villagers got that impression. A woman with two children hiding behind her skirt asked the officer where they were meant to go. The German laughed and jerked his thumb over his shoulder at nowhere in particular. There. Somewhere else.

The expulsion of these people, who had already been picked clean by war, was a godsend for the British escapers. Instead of having to take their chances in open country and on deserted roads, they passed unnoticed among the straggled columns of the homeless. Damaged and dishevelled, anxious and carrying little or nothing, they looked entirely Dutch. The occasional German patrols who idly surveyed the refugees paid them no particular attention.

So it was that by early afternoon one hundred and twenty men had made it to their rendezvous, a logger’s hut in the woods somewhere between Ede and Arnhem. They were greeted by two members of the Dutch resistance and two British officers, a lean brigadier and a madly cheerful young major. The brigadier was disguised in an ill-fitting black suit; he looked like an undertaker who’d fallen on hard times. The major wore rough farm clothes and carried, incongruously, a furled and bullet-torn umbrella. One of the Dutchmen was a heavyset bearded man called Banjo. The other was Tamar.

After a wait that seemed longer than it was, a boy with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder appeared on the rough track that led to the hut. He stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled, piercingly. Soldiers who had been sitting beneath the trees got to their feet. Three elderly trucks laboured into view. Powered by charcoal gas, they wheezed and farted horribly as they manoeuvred awkwardly in the spaces between the trees. Each truck carried a great many empty sacks, as well as several containing potatoes.

The brigadier and the jaunty major divided the men into three groups and got them piled into the trucks. The drivers heaped empty sacks over the bodies and scattered potatoes on and around them. Tamar climbed into the passenger seat of the lead truck and shook hands with the driver, a middle-aged woman in overalls whose grip was as rough as tree bark. She wrestled the gear lever into first, growling, “Get in there, you bugger.” The truck gasped and lurched forward; there was some muffled English swearing from the back.

Tamar had little doubt that they would run into German checkpoints before they reached Renkum. He’d talked it through with Banjo and the British officers.

“Banjo has achieved the impossible, getting these trucks for us,” he said. “And the trucks themselves are our ace card because the Germans will think we must be some sort of official convoy. There’s a good chance that they’ll just wave us through. There’s also a chance that they won’t.”

“Understood,” the brigadier said. “Then what?”

“Well, I’ll try to bluff them. What’s in our favour is that no one in his right mind would be taking three truckloads of British soldiers down to the Rhine in broad daylight.”

“Absolutely,” the jolly major agreed. “We’ve got craziness on our side. Terribly sensible, the Germans. Gives us the edge.”

“So,” Tamar went on, “if we are stopped, the drivers will keep the engines running. I’ll do the talking. Your men must remain perfectly still, even if the backs of the trucks are opened. But if anyone starts to pull the sacks away, they must yell and scream and attack the Germans without hesitation. I know they have no weapons, but that’s what they must do. Is that all right?”

“Fine,” the brigadier said. “It’s what they’d do anyway, I imagine. I’ll go and have a chat with them.”

As it turned out, there were two checkpoints. The first one, a solitary German private with his motorbike propped against a tree, made a gesture that urged them to hurry onwards, rather than stop. The second was a different matter.

Peering ahead, Tamar saw a single figure on the road: an SS trooper cradling a machine pistol. He reached over and touched the driver on her arm, and she slowed. A second German wandered casually onto the road, lifting his rifle from his shoulder. Just off to the right was a wrecked cottage, a vehicle of some sort parked in front of it.

Tamar looked back; the other trucks were close behind. He stuck his arm out of the window and signalled to them to slow down.

The German with the machine pistol stayed where he was. He gestured to the man with the rifle, who approached Tamar’s truck.

“Your papers, please.”

The driver dug into her overalls, produced the little booklet, and passed it through the window. The German scanned it and gave it back. Then he stepped backwards and looked at the other two trucks. In German he said, “What are you carrying and where are you going?”