The Journey Back (12 page)

You don’t even know how to make a bed properly.” No? Dientje had always admired the way I did it. “What that Annie can’t do with a bed,” she used to say. “You even have trouble drawing open the drapes, so they hang right.” I checked. Stuck behind the chair again. But that could be fixed. There, already done, and I hadn’t been gone for more than a second. “Dust … do dishes. Your table manners, Annie, badly need. o prov. Pl, wch me from now on. o op’ Mother he’d. “[ honey don’ow whm ” I smed my h. e fi of my we s wmed from whew

“hh I’ll at e top. Yo always they. Pull it to the side for a mhute, d let me met. I wd of t. From now o hclude yo when-you w.” Her ey moved do. ” co, &e’s yo clo& but I can’t do much aut them y. Md appeance are mnh e, even enough at moment you y k’re not. ey what d of a n you ry a md at’s not a t.” Moer lked mod the v r o He of her chq. “We now we a pi don in s town.” I pucked my forbid. Faer d ht tee cows I w and he’d n we hppy aut it. E t wht she mt? I looked at her. “You’re still yo enough to lm,” Mofier went on, “wch h hcky. oer yd I might have come t la tee bt thing now for you to foet e old d ght hto e new. I you do ih I get upy.

That’s not good for me. Nel was always wonderful about that. She never gave me trouble.” I wouldn’t, either. She didn’t have to be afraid. I just hoped I could remember it all. There was so much-everything, as she sad. I moved a little closer to her, but our talk must be over.

Mother was getting up. Maybe I could do something for her, do it perfectly, show her I could learn fast. She gave me her coat to hang up.

It had an especially big collar, a fur one, with a face, eyes, mouth, teeth. Carefully I held the coat away from me as I carried it into the hall. I hung it on the first

” Zinnie.” Frightened, I looked at the teacher. “I’m glad someone is interested in this class. You didn’t even hear the bell. You’re a good g’trl. Go home.” I got up. “Thank you,” I said politely. It had been nice, yesterday, sitting with Mother for so long, doing nothing, like a lady. I was going to write Sini and Rachel tonight, tell them not to worry either. But first … There were all those words I had gotten right today on the spelling test -more than half. “Hij bloedt” had been one of them. I had not forgotten to put in the “d,” even though the teacher had tried to trick us by accent THE JOURNEY RACK “t” as he said it. But I wouldn’t boast to just mention it as if it were nothing spe was writing a letter as I hurried in. “Not Annie,” she said. “If I can finish this quickly, v’dl have it before the end of the week.” I sat down, waited, checked the clock. a long letter it was turning out to be.

There, sealed the envelope. “Mother-” her handwriting is beautiful, I thought, as I to the post office. Those spelling words? What them? They had been easy, and I had gotten half of them right anyway. 4.

At the end of October we received a letter from Rachel; not from the town she had gone to, from another one-Renkum-where the big sanatorium Was. “Dear Father, I won’t be getting the teaching job I wrote you about after all. Something has happened. I had to have a physical, the last barrier, I’d hoped, before they hired me. It was a long examination; ‘no doubt became the doctor’s new in town,” my ‘family’ said when I came home. The old one wasn’t so fussy. This one took X rays, too. “When I went back a few days later for the results, I was told”-Father stopped for a moment, then he read on, bending his head-“that I have tuberculosis. How did I get it? I asked the doctor. He’s not sure. But there has to be something in town that causes it, he said. People in other places have been underuourished and crowded together in small rooms. They don’t have tuberculosis. He has found it in three other applicants for the job. He suspects it’s the canal. Father, how could I have known that? I’ve been sitting there every night since I came back here. Sure, I saw people dump scrub water into it, and fill up their teakettles. It seemed dirty to me. But more-no. Maybe I should’re known it was dangerous when I saw’ the fish come u for air. But I grabbed them, too, just like the others. No standing in line and no coupons, we all thought as we carried them home. I don’t know why that upsets me so now. I ate them during the war. Who knows what else is in that canal?

Spit, and what not. I’ve done a lot of thinking since I arrived here.

Working in that store didn’t help me either, I now see …”

“I saw that the minute she wrote about it, Ies. Brr. Used American clothes, who knows who’s been in them?”

Father went on. “When a new shipment came in, and the people rushed over, all breathing in my face -everyone was always looking for black. I never’ wrote you that; I guess. They wanted to be properly dressed again in case of another funeral. I see what I’ve just said. Don’t worry, Father, I’ll be fine. And I didn’t get sick in the pest two months either. I’ve had it for a long time, the doctor said. That’s why it’ll take a while to get better. Fortunately I’m used to waiting.”

When Father finished reading us the letter, he went. to the telephone to call Rachel. In a few seconds he was back. He couldn’t talk to her.

She was not allowed out of bed. “How long will she have to be there?” I asked. Rachel had not really said. Father took off his glasses. “A year or two, they think.”

“Well, that’s life,” Mother said. “Why did she have to be hidden in that, he asked. His voice shook. That, Mother did not know. “First she becomes religions there,” she said, “and now this.” Father left, quietly closing the door behind The letter was still on the table, open. “P.

S.,” I read. “Please take Annie to a She’s so frail. What if gave it to her?”

I could have it; too? Mother must also have read that part. She was already running to the tale phone y.

just a few weeks later, judges from England, France, Russia, and the United States traveled to a city in Germany called Nuremberg. Twenty-one of Hitler’s closest friends and helpers were waiting there to be tried for having planned and started the war. Rachel’s war, Father’s, Mother’s, Sini’s, Johan and Dientje’s, so many other people’s.

Practically the whole world’s. Mine. It was the same city people had traveled to for nine hundred years, to look at the houses and churches, to eat in the inns, walk along the winding streets, sketchbooks in their hands. The same city, too, where in the thirties and early forties they had gotten together, those twenty-one, for their party’s annual meeting.

Again many people came-tens of thousands at once this time. Just for that. And for Hitler’s speech. “Heil!” they screamed, with their right hands raised in the Nazi salute. And their eyes full of hate. Toward Jews, Slavs, gypsies, Communists, priests, and Germans who weren’t any of those, who just thought differently. “Heil!” Nazi voices had roared in the September sun. “We are with you, Hitler. You know what’s right.

You know what we need. Hell! Hell! Hell!” It was not the same Nuremberg any more, the papers said. The churches and inns were gone, and piles of rubble covered the little winding streets.

Allied bombs … But the jail was still standing, and so was the courthouse, untouched. When the trial opened, the accused men were fidgety, bored. They hardly listened to the prosecutor as he recounted their crimes. One of Hitler’s friends fell asleep. That bored. But he woke up in time to grab the microphone and say what the. other twenty had already said, “Nebr.” Not guilty -of anything. “Not guilty?” most people in Holland shouted. “What’s the matter with them?” Don’t worry, the papers answered. The proof is there, in Nuremberg. Those men had care frilly written everything down, all their plans, and forgotten to destroy the documents when the war ended. When they were shown a movie of what had taken place in their camps, they covered their couldn’t watch. At least the men are no longer bored, the announced. “No longer bored!” the people of Holland shouted. “Hang them. They don’t even deserve a trial. A lot of talking and what for?” Not everyone shouted.

Some cried—those who had lost relatives and friends in the camps and read what had happened to them every day when the newspaper came. I would have liked to go over to Mother and comfort her. I was afraid to, even though the doctor had said I did not have tuberculosis. What if Mother was right and the incubation period could be longer for some people?

November went on. With school, going either alone or with Jannie md the others; the masseur afterward; coming back home fast, always. That’s what Mother liked. “How come you’re late, Annie?” she’d say at the door, even though I never was. Nice. l. didn’t mind too much, about Nel The stories Mother told, the letters she read, the telephone calls she discussed. I hardly mentioned mr sisters any more, or Johan or Dientje.

Mother did not seem interested in hearing about them; she always interrupted when I began: “That has to do xith the old, Annie.” I sighed. “Did you hear what I just said, Annie?”

“Where did Nel go now, Mother?”

“She went to two parties over the: weekend.

Now you can e how imt it k or people to look good. Appearances make all the difference in the world.” I smiled. I was working on that. My ears hurt from all the scabbing. No, I didn’t mind about Nel, not much. Only sometimes. But then I’d forget, the minute Mother said, “And now, Annie, …” Anything could come. Not necessarily

More traveling was done at the beginning of that winter. The deadline in Walcheren had been met, except for one hole. Special buses went mound Holland, to pick up the last of the island’s refugees. A bus came towinterswijk, too. It stopped in the marketplace. “Do yu have any cats to give me?” the driver asked. “Good, all of you are carrying boxes, I see. Hand them to me, and I’ll put them on the back seats.”

That’s what the people of Walcher en had asked for, since the island cats had drowned a long time ago when the water first came, and there were many rats now. Knives, too, the refugees took home, sturdy ones, to scrape off the mussels that the North Sea had deposited on their floors and walls. They said goodbye. “Hope we did not stay too long, and that it wasn’t too much for you.”

“Think nothing of it,” their Winterswijk hosts assured them. “We did it with pleasure.”

“Come and see us,” the islanders shouted from the bus. The ornaments on the old-fashioned caps trembled as the women moved their he

“But give us a while to clean the place up the salt out of the soil plant some things. Then come.” I would; I would. Mother he’d never been this either. We could all go, when the island 1o pretty again, as it had in the picture book I once seen. “Goodbye.” And Sini, she tveled, too.

She might even b the train right now while I was walking away f the marketplace. She had a new job, taking csn small children whose parents couldn’t. Whet Mother said about that after dinner? I laughed. someone not interested in my “old people,” she tainly spent enough time talking sbout them. Ev time a letter came. Last night’ had been Sini’s re

“She’s a very flighty girl. Anyone can see d She’s no Nd. And mark my words, she won’t more than a month at this j6b, either. She doe have what it takes.” Mother hsd stopped filing nails and looked over st Fsther. He was sitting n the stove, his legs Stuck out, once in s while c tentedly wriggling his toes in the direction flames that shone red and blue behind the m door. “I shouldn’t lure gone to the library for him

Mother complained. “Once you give that man a book he’s lost. My first husband was also a cattle dealer, but not like this. He loved to dance, tell iokes. He made me laugh. I’m not used to all this reading. What does your father see in it night after night?” He’d stop soon; he did not have that many more pages to go. “I hate to think of the next few months,” Mother continued, “sitting here by myself. Nel was right-this might just as well be Siberia for all the people I see out here. And evenings will get a lot longer before they get shorter.” I knew. They were long. Especially now that I no longer had time to read. Father’s toes again, wriggling. Would Mother like me to teach her some English?

That would make a big difference, she’d see. She could listen to the songs. on the radio, know what they were about. And I was good at English. “Would you like me to, Mother?” A pity. Mother didn’t think she needed, any It would have been nice. “Go fix the drapes, Annie. You still don’t draw them right. I sometimes wonder whether you ever will.”

It was my own fault that Mother was annoyed. I should not have told her I was good at English. Maybe Nel was doing badly in school, and Mother was worried. But I was not good at everything-not at math or physics or gym. I was very bad at gym. “I have trouble jumping across the rope unless it is practically lying on the floor.” That had been the right thing to say. She was smiling again. After a while, Father closed his book. “Come, Magda, let’s go for a walk,” he said. “I’ve been sitting all evening.” That made Mother laugh. “Now? At this hour? We’ll break our necks.” But she went anyway, with him and the flashlight as usual.

After the book. And our talks before that. Father-all dressed up these days. “A new wife, new rules, Annie,” he said every morning, happily as he went to work, a tie sticking up from his old vest … I stopped walking, squinted. Was that Mother standing in front of the house? Yes.

Quickly I patted my hair down. “Come here, Annie,” she beckoned. Yes, yes. How wonderful that she had come all the way to the road. And I had stopped in the marketplace for only ten minutes.

The letter to Nel had been mailed, the potatoes peeled, the vegetables washed, my homework done. It was almost dark. Quietly I was setting the table, making sure everything was in the right place. Father had home.

I’d heard the back door. He wouldn’t come i all the way in yet, not until he’d taken his shoes and jacket off and brushed his pants. Then

“Here I am. wife,” he’d say, “and I think nor even you can that I have been with the cows all day.” There, just as I thought. He must be giving kiss now. She’d smile, fix his tie, ask him he had had a good day.

“Guess how much I got for that skinny cow morning, the one I kept in the meadow across road,” he’d say. “It was worth at least four hundred guilders, If you let it go for less, you’re a fool.”

“That’s exactly how much I got for it, Magda,” he exclaimed. “Four hundred.”