Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  ‘The Moffen can’t check if every rivet’s been tightened. I tell you, if the Arminius ever puts to sea, it won’t get out of the harbour before it takes on water.’

  ‘You watch you don’t get caught, Manny,’ Hollander put in, over Marinus Glim’s shoulder.

  ‘Nah! There’s nothing to worry about.’

  Professor Kokadorus was still chattering away about going to England. It was possible – just – braving the wild Narrow Sea in a small boat. But Kokadorus made it sound like taking a paddle boat out, on the artificial lake at Artis:

  ‘I’ll be away soon, boys. I’m off to fame and fortune. England’s the place to be, right now. Afternoon tea, that’s the thing for Kokadorus. Just like my friend Hein.’

  Manny gave him a sharp look. ‘Hein Broersen?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘When’s he going, then?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘How long are we going to have to stand here?’ moaned Old Mother Bril. ‘I’ve got bunions, I have. How long can it take to give you a piece of paper?’ Old Mother Bril wiped the back of her nose with a woollen glove with no fingers.

  The queue inched forward.

  Kokadorus was the first of the group around Manny to reach the table in the Town Hall vestibule, staffed by two Dutch women clerks, guarded by two Orpos with rifles. He showed his old licence – now declared invalid. The photograph he had brought with him was stamped into the new licence. Kokadorus signed the card across his photograph. He proudly showed his new trading licence to the other market traders.

  ‘Look at that! There’s a big J on my licence’

  ‘What does that stand for, then?’ said cross-eyed Ko, deadpan.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Manny, to general laughter. Then he was grabbed by the shoulder and spun round. ‘Oy!’ he shouted.

  It was Joel Cosman. He looked serious. ‘I tried your room,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be here.’

  ‘What …?’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Joel said. ‘They’re looking for us.’ He glanced at the head of the queue, at the two impassive, bored-looking Orpos.

  ‘I want to get my licence,’ Manny said.

  Joel squeezed his arm. ‘You can forget about that. We’re both wanted for killing that Orpo. The one I hit on the bridge. Out of here. Now, Manny.’

  *

  ‘You got anywhere you can go?’ Joel said, as they headed out of Dam Square, down the wide boulevard of Rokin.

  ‘I’ll have to go to Tinie’s.’

  They cut east along Oude Hoog Straat towards the Jewish Quarter.

  ‘What about you?’ Manny said.

  ‘It’s best you don’t know where I am, Manny. But I tell you this: Our knokploeg’s. getting bigger and bigger. We’re not going to just sit and take it, son. We’re going to knock the Moffen about a bit.’

  ‘Let me join, Joel.’

  ‘I dunno, Manny. You’re a wanted man.’

  Manny stopped, waving his arms indignantly. ‘So are you! You schmerul!’

  Joel smiled. ‘Alright. You’re in.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Oh, Manny. Grow up.’

  ‘Where you going? You staying somewhere near Tinie?’

  ‘No. I’m just going to see you settled.’

  Manny was about to protest, when they saw the new red and white barricade sealing off the Jewish Quarter. This was at Kloveniers Burg Wal. There was a gatepost but it wasn’t manned.

  ‘Joel! What the hell …?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He stopped, shaking his head. ‘We need false ID cards, mate. And pretty quickly.’

  Even Joel seemed nervous as they walked through the gatepost. The Jewish Quarter was quieter than usual. Fewer traders had set out their stalls in the street, there were fewer passers-by.

  ‘People are staying indoors,’ Manny murmured. ‘Keeping their heads down.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joel said, through gritted teeth. ‘In our own city.’

  Tinie’s door opened before Joel and Manny got to the top of the stairs. She launched herself at Manny, winding her arms round his neck, pulling him into her so tightly he was breathless.

  ‘Oh, Tinie! Tinie!’ There were tears in his eyes. .

  She held him at arm’s length, looking him up and down. Still gripping Manny, she looked at Joel, as if in mute appeal to him, to protect Manny.

  The three of them went into Tinie’s dark box of a room.

  ‘Can Manny stay for a while?’ Joel said. ‘The Moffen are looking for him.’

  ‘Of course he can,’ Tinie said.

  Joel strode to the curtained-off niche. As he pulled back the curtain, the ‘silent’ toilet was exposed. He peered into the higher of two open-topped boxes, fixed against the wall. They were meant as beds for toddlers, when the tenements were built, at the turn of the century . It was full of Tinie’s clothes. So was the bottom one.

  ‘Lucky for you you’re so little,’ he said to Manny.

  ‘Thanks a bunch. Even I can’t get in there.’

  ‘I’ll get Lard to come and deepen the space underneath.’ Joel nodded at Tinie.

  ‘Lard Zilverberg’s our carpenter,’ he explained. ‘Among other things.’

  Joel pulled Tinie and Manny to him and embraced them both. He left without another word.

  Lard Zilverberg arrived within the hour, with his father’s carpentry tools in a worn leather bag. He worked quickly, making as little noise as possible.

  Manny asked him if he knew anything about the sealing off of the Jewish Quarter.

  ‘The barriers are just bits of wood at the moment,’ Lard said. ‘A child could get over them. It won’t stay like that, though. They’re just starting to patrol the perimeter. There are crossing points at Nieuwe Herengracht, Rapenburg and Kloveniers Burg Wal. Probably a few more, somewhere.’

  ‘The one at Kloveniers Burg Wal was open when Joel and I came through,’ Manny said.

  Lard nodded, still hammering on his hands and knees. ‘Most of them are open at the moment,’ he said. ‘Joel and Ben don’t expect it to stay that way. We’ve heard the Moffen are asking the non-Jews in the Quarter to leave.’

  When Lard had finished his work, the bottom of the lower bunk-boxes could be taken out, letting Manny slide into a hollowed-out space underneath it, just big enough to lie flat in. Lard gave it a quick final inspection, then left. Manny looked into his new home. He had become an onderduiker – a diver; a man in hiding, a man who lived down a hole.

  Tinie interrupted his thoughts, her pixie face a picture of concentrated practicality. ‘Tell me what you want from your room. I’ll go over and get it.’

  ‘I don’t need anything.’

  ‘Oh, Manny! You do! You need clothes. You need … soap.’

  Manny looked at her, his face softening as he took her in. ‘It’s too dangerous, Tinie …’

  ‘No, it’s not. Even if the Moffen have found out your address, even if they’re waiting, I’ll say I’ve just come to see you.’

  ‘OK. Get me some … clothes.’ Manny vaguely indicated the threadbare baggy flannels and long jacket he was wearing at the moment. His high-crowned cap was on Tinie’s tiny round table. He gave her the key to his room.

  ‘I’ll get your drawing materials as well.’

  Manny failed to stop a look of delight sweeping across his face. ‘No, don’t … Oh, OK. That would be wonderful. I’ll draw you. It’s ages since I’ve drawn you.’

  For nearly twenty minutes, they chattered away about how many drawings Manny had done of Tinie, when they were drawn, how old Tinie had been at the time, and whether the drawings were any good – Tinie said they were, Manny said they weren’t. Their sentences fell over each other like puppies playing. Tinie, especially, rarely got to the end of what she wanted to say before Manny interrupted her.

  ‘I’ve got to go, ‘ Tinie wailed eventually, and scooted out of the room, while Manny was still talking.

  She was back quickly, with one of his linen laundry
bags. The first item which fell out, with a thud on the table, was Laws of the Netherlands.

  ‘Keep your hand in,’ she said. ‘One day, you’ll be able to finish your law studies. You’ll be Amsterdam’s leading lawyer. And I’m going to be so proud of you.’

  He hugged her. ‘We could live in a big house near Artis,’ he said, without thinking, without realising he had just proposed.

  She made no reply, but pulled some of his clothes out of the linen bag. Then she carefully took out his drawing pencils and plenty of paper. She had not brought the paints.

  He wondered at her. As ever, she had got it exactly right. It would be difficult to conceal his painting equipment – for a start the oils gave off a pungent smell in the badly ventilated tenement rooms.

  ‘I brought these, too, she said, pulling out pages filled with his tiny, neat handwriting.

  ‘I know where you hid them!’

  ‘Tinie!’

  They were drafts and re-drafts of Manny’s Snowball Letters - open letters, passed from hand to hand, in the first days of the Nazi occupation. Manny was one of many writing them. Some were banda’d, though most, like Manny’s, were handwritten. They called for resistance, often predicting what life under the Moffen was going to be like. One of Manny’s Snowball Letters, the one he was proudest of, had accurately predicted rationing and labour transits to German factories.

  Manny smiled as he read some of his own early drafts, as if he had never seen them before: At the top of most of them he had drawn a geus – a beggar. That was what the Spanish occupiers had called the Dutch resistance, in the sixteenth century - Geuzen. The Dutch had worn the name with pride then; their successors, those who fought the Nazis, adopted it with equal pride now.

  ‘Tinie, it’s dangerous to keep these here,’ he said. ‘I’ll destroy them.’

  ‘No you won’t! They’re terrific, Manny.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’

  ‘Listen. Either they’ll find you here, or they won’t. If they find you, the Snowball Letters will hardly make things any worse.’

  ‘Alright.’ Manny folded his papers up and pushed them into his trousers pocket.

  ‘I want you to keep these, too.’ Tinie held up two drawings she had unpinned from the wall of Manny’s room.

  ‘Oh, you! You shouldn’t have! You’re wonderful!.’

  Tinie gave her toothy, urchin grin. ‘I know! I know!’

  The pencil and charcoal drawings were of Professor Meijers and Professor Cleveringa. Meijers had been Manny’s law professor at Leiden. A leading jurist, he was the most senior of the Jewish faculty the Nazis had dismissed from their jobs.

  Manny had been among the student leaders who had gone to Professor Cleveringa – also a law professor, a Christian - to ask him to lead a protest, at the dismissals. Cleveringa had addressed the entire student body, at the time Meijers was due to lecture. Speaking in a flat unemotional voice, he asserted the Rule of Law, against brute force. He praised Meijers as an individual – a man of distinguished achievement, a man of worth. He said the dismissal of Jewish faculty because of their religion was illegal, and morally wrong.

  The Nazis came for him the next day – he had his bags packed. Manny and the Leiden students spent the next forty-eight hours without sleep, fuelled by constant cups of coffee, typing out copies of Cleveringa’s speech. Then they went on strike. The Nazis closed Leiden University, in reprisal.

  Keeping the drawings of Meijers and Cleveringa pinned up in his room had been dangerous, even reckless. But to Manny, Cleveringa embodied Dutch defiance, and all that was good about Holland. He wanted to keep his drawing of him, and the one of Meijers, as long as he lived. He went into the niche and hid the drawings in the hollow Lard Zilverberg had made.

  ‘What shall we do now?’ he said, as he came back into the room.

  She smiled. ‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’

  ‘I want to draw you.’

  ‘What now?’ He could see she was pleased.

  Just then, they heard footsteps thudding on the stairs, from the flight below. Manny looked at her, in alarm.

  ‘It’s Max,’ Tinie said. She recognised his tread well enough.

  Manny frantically gathered his belongings from the table up into his arms.

  ‘Manny! What are you doing?’

  ‘Quick, help me.’

  ‘But it’s your Uncle Max, Manny!’

  ‘Maxie has regular meetings with Rauter, and with the NSB. It’s not safe.’

  Tinie nodded. She thought he meant that Max might be pressurised, even tortured, into betraying him. But Manny meant that Hirschfeld might betray him voluntarily.

  They frantically threw Manny’s possessions into the upper bunk-box, under Tinie’s clothes. Manny then eased himself into the hollow that cupped his body, lying flat out. Tinie replaced the bottom of the lower bunk-box over him. She stood there anxiously, worried that Manny couldn’t breathe. But he let out a muffled ‘I’m OK.’

  Tinie drew the curtain across the niche, and curled up in the armchair, just as Hirschfeld came in. She hoped he wouldn’t need to use the toilet. Manny, in his hole, heard Hirschfeld tell Tinie about the Hirschfeld List. He heard him boast about having found Simon Emmerik a job. And then he heard what Hirschfeld made Tinie say and do. He cried, silently, there in his diver’s place, lying on top of his drawings of Meijers and Cleveringa. He hated Hirschfeld.

  *

  When Hirschfeld had gone, it took Tinie a long while to calm Manny down. Through his sobs, he kept saying, ‘I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him.’ Tinie had folded the camp-bed back against the wall. She sat in the armchair, with him half in her lap, half on the floor, cupping his head in her arms, bending over him, pushing the top of his curly-haired head into her small, mauled breasts. And after a long, long time like that, Manny stopped crying.

  Gently disengaging herself, Tinie gave him some weak tea and made him eat some rusks. Then she said ‘Why don’t you draw me now?’

  ‘What after … is that what you want?’

  ‘Yes. But don’t draw this room. Draw me at the party.’

  There had been many parties, but he knew which one she meant. It was late in April; the last party before the German invasion. Her father was still in his job, her family reasonably prosperous; she was still a flower of a girl, with a young girl’s vivacity and a young girl’s dreams.

  It was Truus Bosse’s twenty-first birthday party. Truus was a classmate – one of the gang they had known since childhood. Her father was something high up in the railways, so they lived in a great wedding-cake of a place near Vondel Park.

  In the elegant drawing room, they had drunk glasses of Pimm’s Number 1 Cup, greatly improved by being made with Dutch Bokma jenever. They had eaten canapés, then, at midnight, a hearty fat sausage buried inside a mound of cabbage – a clever idea by Truus’s mama, to sober the young people up.

  Tinie was a good dancer – a fluid and graceful mover, which stood her in such good stead at the sports she loved so much. She did the Charleston; then danced the Black Bottom with Cas Blom, another of their circle. She had spent the end of the evening on Cas’s lap, kissing him. In the middle of one kiss, she had given Manny a wink, and a cheeky wave. He had burst out laughing.

  ‘Do you want me to pose?’ Tinie said. A tinge of pink appeared in her cheeks at the memory of the party.

  ‘No … Yes.’

  ‘Which?’

  He didn’t need her to pose, but sensed it would make her happy. ‘Pose.’

  She posed. He began to sketch her, humming a Charleston rhythm the while. ‘Do you remember Cas?’ he said, innocently.

  She stuck her tongue out at him.

  He knew she was delighted with the finished sketch. He could tell when she was faking - she wasn’t. Manny took his block of drawing paper and began sketching something else.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘It’s private.’

  ‘Meanie!’

  He started laugh
ing. ‘Stop it! I can’t draw when I’m shaking. You know Hein Broersen, don’t you?’

  ‘Which one’s he? Oh yes. I think so …’

  ‘You can’t remember where he lives, can you?’

  ‘Um … I think so. Why?’

  ‘I’m not telling you.’

  ‘Man- NEE!’

  ‘OK. I’ll tell you. I heard he’s going to try the crossing tomorrow. To England.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Old Kokadorus.’

  ‘Kokadorus is mad.’

  Manny was sketching, concentratedly. ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t make him inaccurate.’

  ‘True! When do you want to go and see Hein?’

  Manny finished his sketch. ‘How about now? Well, in minutes, or so. I just want to write a letter to my father, first. I’ll give it to Hein, to give to him. If he makes it to London.’

  *

  Hein lived on Rapenburger Straat – right opposite the Jewish Seminary. As they arrived, he was just going out. Manny solemnly handed over his letter to his father, and the sketch, which he had steadfastly refused to let Tinie see – also for his father. The morose, lugubrious Hein took them with no particular interest or reaction. He said he intended to spend his last night in Amsterdam at the Tip Top theatre. He asked Manny and Tinie to come with him.

  ‘We can get tickets at the door,’ he said. ‘All together.’

  Manny and Tinie looked at each other. So far, the Moffen had left the Tip Top alone, as well as all the other Jewish cabarets and cinemas – the Tip Top was both. It was inside the Jewish Quarter, so they wouldn’t have to cross a checkpoint. Being lost in the crowd there could be safer than staying in Tinie’s room, as well as more fun. They decided to go.

  As the three of them walked there, through the clear starlit evening, they talked about Hein’s trip to England. All the Engelandvaarders - the escapees to England – were invited to tea with Queen Wilhelmina. The Queen introduced them to all the others who had made the trip. All being well, Hein could be meeting Manny’s father as soon as tomorrow.

  That excited Manny, but he rapidly lost interest in the mundane Hein himself - a tall, bony, horse-faced figure, plodding along in huge boots. Manny and Tinie left him behind, arm in arm, skipping and bouncing along the pavement