River in the Sea

by Tina Boscha

  Mrs. Deinum took a step forward. “They do not know the identities yet.” Leen wondered, is this real? Is Mrs. Deinum real? Am I understanding her words? She touched each pad of her fingers to the old, slick wood, polished by her own hands last week. Yes, it was last week. She had scrubbed it and all the chairs down, then found an old tin of wax and made the wood gleam until it reflected her face. Never before had she done such good work.

  “Leen?”

  She stared down, not meeting Mrs. Deinum’s eyes, looking past the frayed socks, past the loose stitches. She couldn’t stop rubbing the wood of the table, wanting to feel the smoothness, couldn’t stop hoping that Mrs. Deinum would stop and declare herself crazy for saying something like that, for creating such a story.

  Instead her employer said, “Famke, they took the bodies.”

  Her words came to Leen as if she was speaking from another room. She explained there wasn’t any reason to take the bodies, unless it was to burn them, or to show them somewhere. She apologized, said this was coming from her husband. But no one had to tell her that there was no sense to it. Just cruelty, a vicious desire to promote confusion. The German forces were at the end of their desperate rope. She kept speaking, her words peculiarly eloquent. Most of the time the bodies were left, so that the women could find them and take them away, a group of Marys coming to care for the dead, tidying up after such a messy death.

  A chair scraped, followed by a shuffling, stumbling sound, and Mrs. Deinum’s hand lined up directly in her line of vision, and Leen stared at it, curious that she had never noticed the pale freckles and the wide, flat fingernails of her thumbs. Leen saw the hand disappear and a second later felt a hand – only later realizing it was the same one – grip her firmly under her arm and begin pulling her up, and it wasn’t until this moment that Leen realized she had slumped to the tiles, hard floor on hard knees, like the knobs of her spine on the back of the wooden church pew.

  “Leen?” Mrs. Deinum said. Her face was knotted in tenderness. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m okay.” She looked at Mrs. Deinum and recognized her thoughts. It was Pater there. But Mrs. Deinum said no. She said, “Nee, nee, now you listen to me. That’s not what happened here.”

  She shook Leen a bit, gripping her hard at the shoulders. “Go home. Stay home the next few days, okay? The soldiers are out in the streets and the L.O. is bound to retaliate. It’s going to be an ugly time. Stay close to home. Do you understand me?”

  Leen stared at her and she peered back until Leen nodded. Mrs. Deinum didn’t let go. Not until she said to her sternly, again repeating, “Listen to me.” Mrs. Deinum stared at her hard and Leen saw what she was like as a mother, what it was like when she had to confront her children, any matter that was serious. She was suddenly not a gossip but direct, and she stared and while she was not soft it made you want to fall at her feet.

  “Leentje, you don’t know anything, okay? You don’t know anything for sure. You just hold tight.”

  Even as Leen nodded she felt the beginnings of it, the mouth pulling down, of the disintegration, the struggle behind her eye sockets.

  “Hey,” Mrs. Deinum said, “Komme. Not now. Not yet.” She winced at her words and Leen wanted to say, But you see it too! It’s possible that my father is dead. It’s why you’re telling me.

  Mrs. Deinum got her coat and helped her put it on. “Can you make it by yourself?”

  Leen nodded once more. She was glad that all the things Mrs. Deinum asked required only movement to reply. She worried that if she let any air into her mouth it would set off. She wanted to be alone before she fell apart. Her legs felt like rubber as she pushed off on her bicycle.

  There was no one in the streets anywhere, no soldiers marching, no women scurrying with satchels of packages or children, no men smoking and looking wary. Everything was deserted and many of the home’s windows were covered over with the familiar black paper even though it was not yet afternoon tea time and the sun pushed through the clouds, insisting on warmth.

  Leen shivered.

  She stopped at the last road where she might encounter any traffic, before she was in the countryside. She remembered: turn left, double back into town, and then right at Leiden street, and right again. It was never a place she had gone to with a purpose, only walked or ridden past, noting the roses, admiring how someone had trained vines around the gate. Old men congregated there, finally old enough not to worry about work, too old to worry about conscription even, reading, talking, sitting in silence, relying on habit to get up and get dressed and get out of the house with some destination in mind.

  They wouldn’t be there now. The courtyard would be empty.

  She had to see it.

  Pedaling fast, she barely slowed when roads intersected. She lifted off the seat, muscles burning, mouth open, hair getting caught on her tongue, making her gag and spit. She was off her bike before she braked and she let it topple onto its side, wincing at the sound of metal and brick colliding, but not stopping to right it. She went to the gate and touched a vine. The buds were plump. The warm April air had finally teased them out, the sun too tempting. The daffodils already had flirting tips of yellow. She looked up. This sunshine, this weather was blasphemy against the deep stains on some of the brick walkways, darker spots on the grass. She knew what a blood stain looked like. It wasn’t red. The stain was always deeper, more brown, more black.

  She tugged weakly on the gate. It clanged, barely moving two centimeters. She looked down. It was padlocked. By whom, she didn’t know. She walked along the perimeter until a sturdy hedge blocked her way. She tried counting the stains. It was impossible. Everything in shadow could potentially be a place where a man bled and died, one out of what was it? Twenty–one.

  She started to see it, the entire scene. Images emerged slowly, like the first bubbles in a pan set to boil. One by one they shot up to the surface into a coherent vision of what happened in the silent courtyard, the action unfurling right in front of her eyes.

  It must’ve started as a razzia. Heavy trucks sped onto the streets, so quick they seemed to appear out of nowhere: a sudden line of gray and brown metal, one, two, three. Doors opened and boots stomped as they hit the ground. The men’s movements were between a walk and a run, each step exact, each footfall precise. The officers signaled each other, spoke words in a low voice, and then they split up.

  There were three or four soldiers per truck. They had guns and that counted as another soldier altogether. The soldiers held their guns, one hand on a holster, one with a rifle, the shiniest part of their uniform. They used the rifles to nose open doors and rush past, voices shouting, guns pointing at the frightened people inside. Some of the soldiers were sneering but there were a few, just a handful, whose fear filtered through. There hadn’t been much killing in Friesland, in this charming little town of Dokkum, a sophisticated relief amid the peasant villages. This was new. This was different. This was terrible.

  There was a woman, an older woman, like Leen’s beppe in Hantumheizen, with white hair and ruddy cheeks and a sunken mouth because she had lost her teeth. This mouth, combined with the scared look in her small, pink–rimmed eyes, gave away the depth of her terror. The soldiers saw this. They could get whatever they wanted to know from this old woman. Pointing a gun in her face, they threatened to shoot into the walls or to shoot her. She crumpled, from her eyes to her mouth that folded in on itself only to gape open as she pointed upstairs. She watched the soldier’s boots stomp up a narrow curving staircase, just like the one that curved up to Leen’s room. They returned with two, yes it was two, Leen decided, two disheveled men with wrinkled clothes and unkempt beards. They had been hiding in a small room behind a false wall with nothing more than an old bucket to relieve themselves and opened tins of food that were licked clean. The floor of their space didn’t have a single crumb from their bread.

  The soldiers herded the men past the grandmother, who was shielding her eyes and shaking and crying out in an old, o
ld Frysk that she was sorry. The men were ushered out, guns at their back, and loaded on the truck. Their eyes were wide and they knew this and so they looked down and said nothing. They wouldn’t beg for their lives because that was already clearly decided. Just as the truck began to scream away, one called out to the old woman who had sheltered them, now standing outside, sobbing. He said thank you, and everything would be alright, and the other called to her to tell his wife, please tell his wife.

  At first, she didn’t define the features on the men’s faces but Leen knew the first man was Pater. He’d been close by all along, in Dokkum, not out of the province as Leen had hoped, not in Groningen or Flavoland or to the islands. He had never gotten to Ameland or Texel or Teschelling, places off the coast that had less people and less houses and less Germans. She pictured him, she saw him, in the back of that truck, just as she’d watched the Van Der Sloots and the Veenstras and the Kuipers rounded up in Wierum two years before, sitting almost politely on the rough benches before they were driven off, the crowd that gathered a mute witness. No one had ever seen them again. Leen had never known they were Jews. Not one of them had worn the yellow star.

  Pater had a jagged beard, spotted white on each cheek. It didn’t suit him. His eyes were the same green–gray, but today they were not dancing or sparkling. They darted back and forth. He’d be searching, Leen knew. He’d be searching for a way out.

  The trucks collected at the end of the street. All the men, 10; 13; 18; finally all 21, waited on the trucks, guarded by too many soldiers, some silent and watching, some commanding in a perfected shriek not to move. How long did this take? Twenty minutes? The SS had been planning this for months, securing locations, paying informants, still finding sympathizers even now as other countries fell to the Allied liberators.

  None of the men spoke to each other. The few who had tried had been hit. One man was unconscious, knocked out by the butt of the gun. He’d lost several teeth. A molar rested on his boot, the sunlight glinting off the fresh blood. Pater glanced at the others in his truck. A head was shaken, nearly imperceptibly. Escape was impossible. Each took a glance at the courtyard. They knew why the Germans had chosen it. The green shoots of the tulips and jonquils were a convenient reminder of the season and the cutting down of life. The soldiers would step on every shoot, every bud about to burst.

  The 21 were lined up in one long row. The men were ordered to turn around, hands behind their backs. “Kneel,” a soldier said, as if the word was new to him. The soldiers paused to look at the men, now facing the gate, eyes stony, crying, some hands trembling. Pater’s face would be calm. It would be set. Silently he would pray, committing his soul to God and asking for care and mercy for his family.

  Maybe he’d ask for it to be quick. This was not above Pater. He was human, Leen reminded herself. He was strong but it would be normal for him to ask for it to be quick. A single bullet to the heart. Cutting everything off and he’d fall with grace and she hoped that this image would haunt the soldiers as they waved the rifles back and forth, shooting until every man was on the ground and there were no shouts or sounds at all, just a pungent, choking smell and soft curls of smoke.

  “Nee,” she said out loud. “No!” She cried out at the ghost of the massacre, the images of her mind overlaid against the empty courtyard. She shouted to Pater’s fallen body, to all the bodies, at the soldiers grunting as they loaded the bodies back onto the trucks, swearing when they stained their uniforms with blood.

  “Doeval,” she said, wiping her face. She was still alone. She clanged the locked gate. Picking up her bike, she held it next to her, remembering suddenly what Mrs. Deinum said. You don’t know anything. There was no way to know if Pater was part of it, not until they got official word once the identities were determined. How would they find out? Was there some kind of list? Some kind of notice, just like the notices in the paper at the beginning of the war, instructing the time and place everyone must report to surrender horses, radios, gold? She could see the execution so clearly it made her keen but Leen couldn’t imagine what this list looked like. Was it a sheet of typed paper, a single title at the top followed by a date? Was Pater’s name just another entry in a list of names, towards the top of the Ds? De Graaf, Oenze. Who would make the list? Who would type it? Who filed it away? She shook her head and swung her leg over the bike. Mrs. Deinum’s voice, forceful in its delivery, echoed again: You don’t know anything.

  No, I don’t, she thought bitterly, and somehow this thought energized her to pull on the orange kerchief still tied to the seat, frantically plucking at the knot, whose hard edges had taken on a skim of dirt and grime, until it came loose. She whipped the kerchief in the air to hear its snap and then tied it around her neck. She pushed on the pedals, banging her ankle against one but refusing to wince, and her body tensed up to keep going, not stopping until she was back at the Deinum house. She’d wait there until Mr. Deinum returned. He knew so much, every day full of information.

  “Leen, you should be home!” Mrs. Deinum exclaimed. “Why–”

  “Where is Mr. Deinum? I need to see him.”

  “He’s at Mr. Schaap’s, but Leen, you really should go home–”

  Leen turned around and left. Outside the butcher shop she struggled to get off the bike without tripping over herself. Her body wanted to get inside, but everything worked at a different speed, hand quicker than elbows, ankles turning too fast for her knees to bend. She felt herself on the verge of crying again, the kind of tears that accompanied words in such a hurry to get out that they joined speech in a kind of high–pitched hiss. She entered Mr. Schaap’s butcher shop, feeling clumsy, showing no control whatsoever, but not caring. “Mr. Deinum!” she cried out.

  But as soon as she stepped inside the doorway, she stopped cold. The air she pushed out of her lungs and mouth was interrupted by the sudden urge to cut off all breath. Of all the people she expected to see at Mr. Schaap’s front counter, Jakob Hoffman was not one of them.

  Nor was her brother Issac.

  Jakob was in his blue coverall. When he saw her he looked at Issac and then looked away from her eyes, tapping at the counter in a meaningless attempt to look busy. Issac wore a familiar shirt, a blue with a slight stripe, and had he been standing on the right instead of the left, he might have had a chance to take off the same white armband that wrapped Jakob’s arm. But instead his eyes directed Leen straight to what she knew he didn’t want her to see. The armband was expertly sewn and fit well, just above the elbow. His hand reached up and then it fell. Unlike Jakob, he looked straight at Leen. His face was not angry, the look he usually reserved for her. He stared so openly she knew he was pleading with her: please, please don’t tell Mem.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt–” she stammered, looking into Mr. Deinum’s kind face, noticing the armband on his sleeve too. Mr. Schaap looked puzzled. All four of them there were Resistance. Only three of them made sense. But Issac? The L.O. stole, they infiltrated, they hid, they bombed. They participated in danger; every act was designed around it. They retaliated. And they were killed. Issac knew all along he shouldn’t be part of it, despite the bravery, despite the need for men. Pater had ordered him to stay out of trouble in his absence. What was more troubling than joining the L.O.? They’d lost Wopke, and if Pater was one of those men? “Oh God,” she said aloud. “Issac… No, you can’t… Wait–” She shook her head, trying to scatter every thought.

  “Famke, you know about what happened today?” Mr. Schaap said softly.

  “She does,” Mr. Deinum said, nodding at the counter.

  She looked at him, staring past Issac. Jakob’s face was still turned away from her. She nodded. “I wanted to ask you how we could find out…” She couldn’t finish her sentence, again. The hot rush of tears returned and a new kind of prickling heat crashed up her spine to her neck and she tried to mumble something about not knowing what to do. Finally she asked, “Do you know if he’s dead?”

  The four of them were
silent. Finally Jakob looked at her with a mixture of sympathy and discomfort. Issac answered with a shake of his head: No.

  She took a breath with all of her chest and before the next she turned around and ran out the door. She had to get home. Again she flung off the kerchief, this time dropping it on the ground, leaving it behind for someone else to take and do with it whatever he wished.

  15.

  Leen did not set out the plate for him. They were down to four now, four plates, four cups, four knives, four forks. She knew Issac would not come home for dinner.

  Her brother was gone and there was no word from him and yet not Mem, not Tine, not even Renske, asked where he might be, not after Mrs. Boonstra came by to tell the news of the massacre, saying very little besides that her husband would stop by later. Her face was drawn.

  If her sisters or mother had asked, Leen would have told them. If God meant for them to know, then they would ask. Really, Issac was leaving her in this predicament. He left it in her hands when he looked at her that way at Mr. Schaap’s. Just as procuring their family’s meals had been in her hands. But this, this she could not take care of. She could not lessen anyone’s worry. She wondered, if she had simply found out Issac’s secret with no other event attached, without the massacre, would he have come home? Or would he have avoided the house, expecting her to tell?

  But no one asked. It occurred to Leen that no one really knew what Issac did during the day, what work there was for him.

  After Mrs. Boonstra left, Mem went upstairs to her room, Tine trailing her, only to return a minute later, wiping her face. She said nothing else besides, “She wants to be alone. What did you start for dinner?”

  At the table, Renske gazed at Tine, then Leen, then back again. Leen said, “We might as well eat while the food is hot.” She picked up her fork and used it to cut a boiled potato in half.