River in the Sea

by Tina Boscha

  It went like that for an hour: take the meat, go downstairs, go back up. After so many trips her leg began to throb. She ignored it.

  In the kitchen, Leen asked Mem, keeping her voice low, “Should I set some of these aside?” The last time they had slaughtered a pig Mem had snuck some of the packages of pan–fried meat, still warm, into old buckets, then instructed Leen and Tine to go to certain households, usually widows or invalids, and deliver them.

  But Mem shook her head. “Oh, nee, nee, we need to keep this,” she protested. She turned and rushed down the cellar ladder, one arm loaded with parcels.

  “I asked too,” Tine said.

  They finished just past 9 o’clock, everyone exhausted. They ate none of the results of their hard work. And to Leen, Pater looked grim instead of pleased at the stacks of meat cooling on the counter. Before she went to bed, she stuffed the folded packet of salt into an old pair of woolen hose and pushed it towards the back of her drawer.

  Leen came down for a glass of water before going to bed. Despite being bone tired, she knew she would not sleep. She wore an old nightgown, several years’ old, still fitting around her but inches too short. She padded into the kitchen and found Pater at the kitchen table, smoking, while Mem sat next to him, busily buttering slices of bread and stacking them. Mem said, “You think it’s enough?”

  “It’s enough,” Pater answered.

  Leen took a risk and sat down at the table. Mem ignored her and began wrapping the stacks of bread; they were probably for Issac and Pater to have for lunch the next day. Her fingers worked quickly, as if she hadn’t just spent hours working. Mem looked determined, her mouth twisted in concentration, her jaw hardened and straight. But her eyes seemed to be elsewhere whenever Leen looked at her. It felt like a cold blanket poured out of them and onto Leen’s shoulders.

  “Okay, Oenze, this should be all right, yes?”

  “Aafke, it’s fine, it’s fine,” Pater said. He often told Mem to be still, to settle herself. He would hold out his hands at his sides and then move them slowly up and down, like he was telling their old horses shhh, calm down. But tonight the words did not match Pater’s movements. His foot tapped constantly but without a familiar rhythm. His jitteriness reminded Leen of when he saw storm clouds during harvest, and how he would run up and down the field and clap his hands and shout, “Hup! Hup! Hup! Move, jonges, before the rain comes!”

  Leen’s pulse traveled down her leg to the white bump that had hardened on her shin. She bent down and pressed the ragged end of her fingernail onto the spot. A bright flash of a half moon appeared, then dimmed as the blood surged into the puffy skin, the pain a hot sting that traveled up to her knee. She knew it would hurt.

  “What happened to your leg?” Mem asked, pushing the bread aside and finally looking at her.

  “I cut myself,” Leen lied.

  “Let me see,” Pater said. He bent over and gingerly touched her leg. “There’s something in there. It’s getting infected.” He pulled out a pocket knife. “Aafke, I need some water, please,” he said, his voice matter–of–fact, procedural. “Sit still and don’t flinch,” he said to Leen. He never lied about pain, but his work was quick, and Leen had learned early on not to squirm when he extracted a sliver.

  He cleaned the knife and Leen shut her eyes. She felt the sharp tip of the knife, followed by a sudden burst of heat as Pater deftly removed the shard. She held her breath until the heat dissipated and the pain lessened.

  “Good girl,” Pater said, his voice softer now. He took out a handkerchief and pressed it to Leen’s leg.

  “I’m sorry, Pater,” Leen said, exhaling, eyes watering with relief. Finally she’d gotten it out, but it was not the litany she’d imagined. Her voice sounded tinny, a lamb’s weak bleats. She hoped Mem had heard her too, but when she looked up, Mem was gone.

  Pater didn’t answer her. He balled the bloody handkerchief and put it in his pocket.

  “I mean about last night. And before.” Leen hung her head and pulled her legs to her, pressing the hem of her nightgown to her shin.

  “Acht, leafe, don’t be sorry,” her father said as he stood up, looking down the hallway where Mem must have quietly gone. “Now go to bed, okay?”

  In bed, despite her prediction, Leen fell asleep quickly, tired like an infant who had kept herself up too long with crying and fits. Some time in the night, Leen woke up to the sounds of Pater’s coughs. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Heavy with sleep, she could barely open her eyes. She heard him whisper, “Lekker sleape.” He leaned over and kissed her, then Tine, then Renske, all on the forehead. Then he said, “Good night, mei leafe famkes.” By the time he was across the hall, Leen had already returned to sleep.

  When Leen woke up, it was quiet. She squinted at the clock, thinking it was probably close to five a.m. She squinted again. It was past seven. The papered windows and the winter dawn made it difficult to tell time, but nevertheless she almost always awoke early on her own, accustomed to an early alarm and to the sounds of Pater in the kitchen, the first one of their family up, always.

  The wind pushed against the walls. The bricks they had warmed in the fire the night before and placed under the covers at the foot of their bed were cold, heavy and flat on the sheets. Water dripped down the inside of the windows and the clammy air seeped into Leen’s bones. Winter was here. She shivered, turning her head. Tine and Renske were still asleep. Leen rubbed her face. She would need to eat fast or she would be late to the Deinum’s.

  On the way down the steps, the smell of cigarette smoke penetrated the last of her grogginess. Pater was probably at the kitchen table again, drinking the last of his coffee before he went to work in the barn. Tonight, maybe tomorrow, the soldiers would come.

  But when Leen entered the kitchen, she didn’t find Pater, only Mem at the table, still in her clothes from yesterday, slumped over her arms, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, a long line of ash trailing from the tip.

  Hearing Leen, Mem sat up suddenly. “What time is it,” she said.

  “Seven.”

  Mem nodded. Then her face changed. Her eyes widened and her chin folded inwards and her shoulders began to shake and tears ran down the tops of her cheeks into the lines of her mouth.

  Leen didn’t know what to say. She looked around the kitchen, helpless. Nothing had changed from the night before. The dishes were stacked, the stove was unlit. There was no bread laid out for breakfast, nothing. The entire room was cold.

  “Where is Pater,” Leen said. Her panic rose immediately. “Mem, where is ús heit?”

  Mem shook her head. “Last night,” she said, then nothing more.

  Leen sat down across from her mother. She stared at the bare table. She looked at Mem’s wet face and thought of the stacks of meat, the late night, the slices of bread, all of it wrapped up, ready to be stored. Or, ready to be packed, taken.

  In an instant, she understood.

  8.

  The dinghy made no sound as Leen used the cracked wooden oar to push off, causing small crests of dark water to lap softly against the canal’s edge. Ice was forming along the bank, quickly becoming brown and dirty as it slowly encroached on the withered and rotting grasses. Soon the canal would be frozen over completely. There would be skating; there always was. But the number of skaters would be sparse, maybe mothers with small children, a few boys under twelve. Certainly no men under fifty to link arms with their giggling wives to relive their days of courtship. Without the teenaged boys chasing each other, the teenaged girls would opt to stay home. Leen had always liked to skate. She was a slow starter, never fast off the line in a race, but once her legs grew warm, she could go on and on, and sometimes she did, skating past Ternaard and back.

  She dug the oar into the canal bottom and pushed again. A gust of wind blew, blowing a fine snow across her cheeks, and another degree of lightness in the sky told her yes, morning was coming, and no, she would not be skating this year, not as long as Pater was gone.

 
; Leen hadn’t asked Mr. Boonstra for the use of his small boat. She didn’t think it polite to wake him up before six a.m., on a dark early December morning. Then again, it wasn’t polite to take his lytse boat without asking. But Leen also couldn’t imagine going straight home, not after last night, and still stiff with the need for sleep and the smell of hay mingling with the oil of her skin. She could not get rid of the odor, and she hoped that the hard wind of the Sea might dilute it, along with the smoke from the cigarette Jakob had given her that she planned to have once she got further out on the canal.

  Before the war, she used to take the dinghy out in the summers, escaping after the evening meal to evade the dinner dishes Mem had declared Leen’s responsibility. Breathless from her bolt, Leen would row onto the shallow water, letting the current push her wherever it would take her. Sometimes, in between houses, she would see Mem stalking her, calling her name. “You come home right now!” she’d yell. Leen would answer, “Just as soon as Tine does the dishes!” It rarely worked. The dishes waited for her, stacked, scraped, but still unwashed. But it didn’t matter. Leen liked to be alone on the water, one of the few times she enjoyed solitude.

  She felt for the cigarette behind her ear. This time, the tip was moist from her own skin, but it still made her flush. She lit it with the matches she kept in her pocket. Anticipating the heat, Leen drew in deeply, but the warmth did not live up to her expectations. She needed real fire, something hot enough to cauterize the raw edges of her nerves before she had to drag the dinghy back against the current, wind the rope back around the peeling wooden post behind the Boonstra’s shed, and quickly trudge home. But not yet. Not yet. She imagined rowing through the shallow water until the canal met the ocean, where she would join the rivers in the sea Pater once described to her, explaining the tunnels under the ocean’s surface that could carry you out, borderless canals strung along the seafloor. Submarines used them, Pater had said; they were like a secret web that moved out of the North Sea to England and beyond. But as far as Leen could tell, the canals simply wound through the country, ending and beginning nowhere, never connecting to the world, blocked off by the ever–present green band of the dike.

  When he left, Pater had probably not traveled through those rivers. According to Mem, Pater said two weeks, maybe three; that was all the war had left in it, and that determined how long he would be in hiding. Mr. Deinum had told her, there’ll be Canadians on your doorstep any day now. She remembered his words exactly.

  It was fourteen days since Pater had left. It was thirteen days since Leen went underdoek. And on this cold morning, searching for a glimpse of her dark house between the brick walls of her neighbors’ homes, Leen wondered, not quite allowing herself to hope, if this would be the day he came home.

  Leen had secretly believed that going underdoek was exciting. She could never be part of the official Resistance, never wear the L.O. uniform of blue coveralls with a white band encircling the arm, and while it wasn’t romantic, it was close. And even though she had always understood going underground to be necessary and dangerous, in her mind, the intrigue of the label automatically elevated the status of anyone who needed to go into hiding, even her brother.

  Despite not being part of the L.O., Issac slept underdoek often. It was common for boys and young men to sleep in different barns among the villages, never the same place two nights in a row. Leen had always imagined that groups of boys met and played games, perhaps cards or blokjes like the old men in the café, and smoked and stayed up by dim lantern light, laughing and punching each other when the jokes turned a little mean, then laughing again without grudges or sullenness, not the way of girls. Perhaps the farmer’s or fishermen’s wife would bring out chunks of steaming fried fish and mugs of coffee and slices of creamy, sharp gouda. If a razzia warning was given, everyone would deftly cover themselves, eliminating all traces of their existence in maneuvers practiced to remove critical seconds. In moments, it would appear as if they had never been there, all the while their hot breath contained under piles of hay and false wooden partitions.

  But when she asked Issac, after he first began sleeping elsewhere, if he saw any of his friends the nights he slept underground, he’d scoffed and said, “Why would I do that? The more of us together, the more they can take away at once. Don’t be foolish.”

  Now Leen knew for herself. It was lonely, cold, uncomfortable. Except for the night before, she had never met up with anyone she knew.

  She’d done as Mem had instructed and gone directly to the Feikema barn without going to the house first to tell them she was there. The Feikemas lived on the opposite side of Wierum, not far from the church and the café. Their barn was even tidier and more organized than the De Graaf’s, tools hung on clean hooks, stalls cleared and dirt floors swept smooth. But that didn’t prevent the drafts that snaked through the boards, the dampness that seeped in through the roof that needed thatching, the hardness of the wooden platform and the blunt edges of the hay that poked her skin, no matter how carefully she arranged the quilts she’d taken with her.

  When she opened the barn door, it was dark, except for a single candle in the loft throwing off just enough light to outline a boy’s dark hair.

  The candle was snuffed out so quickly Leen thought she might have imagined it. Then she heard her name. “Leen? Is that you?” and the candle was relit, the bright flame revealing Jakob Hoffman’s face.

  “Sorry,” he said, “you gave my heart quite a shock.”

  Leen blinked, still caught in the surprise. She put her hand on her thumping heart. She was glad he had called to her; if he hadn’t, she wasn’t sure what she would have done, or where she would’ve gone, because she would have been too scared to call out, “Who’s there?”

  “Close the door,” Jakob said, his voice rising a note.

  “Sorry,” Leen said, quickly closing it and latching it from the inside. They stared at each other through the flickering of the candle, its light glinting through the glass holder.

  “There’s no room at the inn,” Leen said, still standing by the door.

  At first Jakob looked puzzled at what she said, but then he laughed, a little falsely, Leen thought. “The Feikema’s are booked full tonight,” he said. “No vacancy.”

  “Should I go?” Leen asked. “We probably shouldn’t… you know…” She didn’t know how to say it, even though the circumstances were innocent. Still, even the emergency of underdoeking didn’t prevent the segregation of the younger sexes during nighttime hours. God’s rules were firm.

  “There’s nowhere else to go,” Jakob said, shrugging. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go back out again.”

  Leen paused. Pater’s last set of instructions to all of the children, delivered via Mem, were to stay out of trouble and keep a low profile, an extension of his early caution to her – Let’s keep it quiet, okay? At home, the hush was unbearable. She was hardly there anymore, between the Deinum’s and the nights spent in frigid barns, but in the few hours home, the silence made it hard to even move. Although she had no eloquent words selected to speak how she never meant to cause Pater to go into hiding, how she had no idea what she would bring upon them, she still felt them balling in her throat. No matter what Mem put out for meals, the words made it difficult to swallow and the food grew dry and mushy and had no taste, and it took glasses of water and milk to get it down. But if she asked for more milk or for someone to pass a plate, she felt greedy, afraid of diverting more scrutiny on herself. So she kept quiet. They all did, saying nothing about their sadness, or their anger, or the palpable fear, except for Renske, who asked every night in a tremulous voice, “When is Pater coming home?”

  Even in the dim light Leen could see Jakob’s eyes studying her, asking the same thing that Leen was wondering: now that we’re both here, what now?

  He seemed to read her mind. “You’ve got to sleep somewhere. Come on. I’ll sleep at the other end.” He pointed towards a spot several meters away from where he was.

&nb
sp; She climbed the ladder, swung her knapsack onto the platform and started to crawl across the loft. Suddenly, knowing he was watching, her movements felt awkward and clumsy, and the noise of the hay crushed under her knees was thunderous. Inexplicably her fingertips started to tingle. She flipped on her backside and tried to scoot herself to a nearby spot, not too close, but not too far away. It was warmest near the candle.

  Through the wavering light, Jakob smiled at her shyly. “Do you want a cigarette?”

  “Please,” Leen said. A smoke would calm her nerves, offering her minutes and the warm buzz to relax. Jakob lit one for her, then passed it. The tip of the cigarette was wet where his lips had been, and she flushed. Thankfully it was still dim, although her eyes adjusted enough that she could see his face in detail. He had a pimple on his chin, a small one but quite red, and if Mem could see it, she would go after it, her hands always ready for popping poekels. Noticing Jakob’s blemishes didn’t distract her from also noticing his hair, the one thing she could never dismiss about him. Leen reached up and pretended to itch her temple, checking her skin. She tried to quickly smooth down her hair. Her lack of motivation for grooming had only grown, but she’d been lucky so far, her skin staying clear, but she hadn’t taken a brush through her coarse hair since the morning, and it was a given that her hands were dirty. She needed a fresh change of clothes, and she probably smelled from her underarms. She started to pick at a ragged edge of a fingernail, then stuffed her free hand under her thigh and took a deep drag.