by Tina Boscha
“We should pray,” Tine said, her head in her hands. “Renske, fold your hands. Let’s all pray together. She began reciting the Lord’s prayer, resting her forehead in her palms. Leen joined her, Renske last, as they recited together: “Ús Heit yn ‘e himel, lit jo namme hillige wurde, lit jo keninkryk komme, lit jo wil dien wurde op ierde likegoed as yn ‘e himel…”
Leen tried to eat. Her middle was twisted and cramped. “When is Mr. Boonstra coming,” she finally said.
“Ik wyt it net,” Tine said. “But when he does, I don’t want him to see Mem.”
“There have been, there have been shootings all over. In a few places, some German soldiers protested. They were shot too. Their bodies were left, usually.” Mr. Boonstra chose his words carefully. Tine had invited him into the living room, but when he declined, stating he would only be there a few minutes, she hadn’t pressed. Leen had sent Renske upstairs to Mem, so it was only the three of them, each of them standing in the kitchen, no tea offered, not even water, and, Leen presumed, each of them feeling the same mix of awkwardness and worry. This was not how neighbors usually talked.
“How can we know?” Leen asked. Tine turned her head to look at her, her expression a mixture of confusion and hurt and then she slowly nodded, turning the thought over and agreeing that yes, it had to be said.
Mr. Boonstra lit a cigarette. He exhaled, staring at the burning tip. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “Everyone who can is working on getting the identities, getting the bodies.”
“So this means nothing, then,” Tine said. Her voice was a note lower than Leen had ever heard her speak. In the presence of authority figures, most often men, she usually faded into the background, a wallflower who emerged only to pour from a kettle or a bottle. Tonight she stood rigid and straight like a chess piece. “It means that Pater could very well still be in hiding.”
“And it could mean… it could mean something else,” Leen said.
“Leentje,” Tine said.
Mr. Boonstra looked at each of them. Leen wanted to see his eyes, but as soon as she met his gaze she looked away, seeing just much how he hated being there, the one to come and tell them the next–to–worst news there was: Your father may be dead, and I have no idea.
“Anything is possible. Word has been sent through the regular channels,” he said, meaning through the L.O., “but everyone is being extra careful right now, given the fragility of all situations. I suppose you should all sit tight for a little while.”
“Sit tight?” Tine repeated.
Mr. Boonstra winced. His thick brows gathered into a knot on his forehead. Leen could see what he would look like when he was an old man, his face a system of points and ridges covered by a full head of white hair. Pater’s hair was thin – she stopped.
“I don’t know, I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have said that. But, it doesn’t hurt, does it? To think something good.” He drew on his cigarette. “The fact of the matter is that the North is still riddled with Germans. They are holding on to us for dear life.” He let out a gruff laugh. “What do they want – all the cows and the fields?”
“Where is Issac?” Tine asked suddenly. She stood even straighter, alarmed. “I haven’t seen him, we need to tell him–”
“He’s with Jakob Hoffman,” Leen blurted out. She couldn’t say the truth, not with Mr. Boonstra there. And it wasn’t quite a lie. She glanced at Mr. Boonstra. Very subtly he shook his head at her. No, not now. So Mr. Boonstra had known her brother’s secret. Leen wasn’t sure how she felt about this mutual cover–up, her sudden relinquishment of her earlier convictions. Who was protecting whom, and what for?
“I will come by again tomorrow,” Mr. Boonstra said, safe words that allowed him out of both the door and the situation. “Go be with your mother, okay? This night will be hard for her.” He left then, and no one walked him to the door. No one replied to anything he said.
“Let’s bring her a plate,” Tine said, her voice somewhere between calm and blunt. “She needs to eat.”
Leen retrieved the silverware and rolled it into an old tea towel while Tine fixed a plate of food. Now that they had it, they centered their conversations and activities around eating. It was distracting in the way they needed. Tine carried the plate while Leen took a mug of tea cut with brandy. They did not have to go far. They found Mem sitting on the second bottom step, Renske’s head in her lap. Mem had both hands over Renske’s ears. “I didn’t want her to hear anything that man said,” she said.
Tine handed her the plate. Leen sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall. Tine followed. “You need to eat, Mem,” Tine said. Renske didn’t move. She rolled the bottom edge of Mem’s dress between her fingers.
“We’ll sit with you,” Leen added. She pushed the mug closer to Mem, who ate only half of her food, but drained the mug dry.
Leen heard a sharp smack. Despite the omnipresent hope that interpreted any nighttime sound as the signal of Pater’s return, Leen knew something had been struck, an object, something flat and hard.
She heard it again. She sat up. There was an exasperated groan. It sounded like Mem.
Leen tried to decipher the time but it was too dark. There was once a time when she could tell within minutes what time it was, noting the edges of light around the paper on the windows. But her body had not had a normal night’s rest for weeks and she could not tell if it was five a.m. or two or if she had been sleeping for longer than an hour.
Tine’s breath was rhythmic, as was Renske’s. Neither of them stirred when Leen heard the sound again, the strike and another vexed sigh.
The floor chilled the bare pads of her feet as she stood up and quietly tiptoed to the door. She rubbed her eyes, trying to hurry their adjustment to the dark. She felt for the door handle, cautiously turning it all the way before she pulled it open and stepped out of the room. She took two soft steps, intending to listen more to decipher where Mem was, and just what it was she was doing, but on her third step her right foot found only empty space and she fell straight down. In the smallest second she worried her fall would never end but then her left knee banged on the wood her foot had sought, while her other foot felt another floor much lower than it should be. “Blixen, ow, oh doeval,” she said, seething as her leg buckled and her shin hit another hard edge, sharp and raw.
She reached out with her hands, her eyes still unable to take in fully where she was. Her palms felt the floorboards, the line where they abutted to the next, and then there was the rough wooden edge rising above her thigh. Her first thought was that she had missed a step, but she had barely left her room, how could she be at the stairs? Her hands traced a gap in the floor. Her fingers found the edges that had scraped her calves and her eyes followed, noticing the different planes, outlined in black shadow. She heard a groan from the bedroom behind her and she said in a hissing whisper, “Go back to sleep, I fell,” even though her leg was caught underneath the floor that Leen had always depended on being there.
She waited to see if Tine would come out and this was when the throbbing began, the blood rushing to both knees. Her tattered skin burned where it opened to greet the air. Her eyes watered, not to cry, but with the sudden rush of her nerves exploding in pain. Taking in one deep breath, Leen shifted onto her left side and gingerly pulled her leg out, letting out breath in small, ragged pants. The stinging erupted when her fingers ran across her scraped skin. She looked again at the dark shadows and finally her eyes made out what her lower half already knew: an entire section of floorboard was missing. Instinctively she felt the wall with jerky fingers, finding the missing floorboard propped up against the wall next to the door to her room. She rubbed her knee, intact but smarting, and tried to calm herself.
“Renske?” Leen heard Mem call, accompanied by shuffling steps.
“Nee, Mem, it’s me,” Leen said. She slowly stood up, her knees screaming. When she tried to put her weight on her left leg the knee bent under the weight, forcing her into an
immediate limp. The pain pooled and thudded under both kneecaps but only her right could take it. Her skin did not want to flex over her muscles and she found the wall again and tried to step down.
“What was that noise?” Mem asked, her face a pale moon at the bottom of the stairs.
“I fell into a hole in the floor,” Leen whispered. She sat down gingerly and put her head on her knees only to sit up again. The pain was getting worse.
“Oh! Ver domme, I’m sorry. I took the radio out and didn’t put back the board. Leen, Leen, poppie, I’m so stupid.” Her voice sounded awake, as if she was taking her mid–morning tea. She was dressed.
“The radio? Mem, what time is it?”
“It’s around one, I think.” She said it as if there was nothing unusual about it, like it was afternoon, post–lunch. “Are you bleeding?”
“So that’s where you hid the radio,” Leen said. All this time it was right outside her door. But the knowledge was no good now; the radio didn’t work. She peeled away the nightgown. There was no blood to sop up. The skin was too open and raw for blood. She wanted ice. But it was probably all outside, kept in blocks wrapped in burlap in the small shed. She didn’t trust Mem to get it. Who retrieved it? Issac? Nee, probably Tine now.
Mem climbed up the stairs. “Did you hurt yourself?” she asked as she gripped Leen’s forearm. Despite the odd hour and scene, it felt like the old Mem was there, a normal mother sensing her child’s pain and rushing to help her. “Can you come downstairs? Lean on me.” Leen let Mem guide her down the stairs, one by one. She leaned on Mem’s arm, but also steadied herself against the wall with her right hand, afraid her weight was too much for Mem’s gaunt frame. But they made it, and Mem took her to a chair in the kitchen.
“Oh, leafe, how stupid of me.” Mem rubbed Leen’s left knee, the worst of the two, and Leen gasped at the pressure of Mem’s fingers. She’d forgotten Mem’s old remedy of rubbing the area immediately after you hit something hard enough to draw a bruise. “Spread the pain out and the bruise goes away quicker,” she always said. It never seemed to work but even now, disoriented from the hour and the fall and the strange lucidity of Mem’s voice that contradicted the absurdity of the situation, Leen welcomed her mother’s warm fingers through the pain. Mem had lit a lantern to light the kitchen and the fuel was low, so the light was soft, and although the air smelled of the diesel, it was still comforting.
The radio sat on the kitchen table as if it was meant to rest there all along. Mem’s voice was almost childish when she said, “I just can’t get it to work. It was set right to the spot, we never changed it, but now, it’s just silent. I don’t understand it.”
Leen’s studied her mother. There were so many familiar details of her decline, the thin frame, the slack, yellowed skin, the dresses that needed scrubbing in scalding hot water, her usual grinning mouth sagging at the corners, now muttering under her breath about the purple already beginning to form on Leen’s knee. In that short bit of time, Mem was gone.
She took Mem’s hand off her knee and then, not knowing what to do with it, held it limply. As gently as she could, she said, “We have no electricity. We had a generator for a little while, do you remember that? But only Pater could get it working and then it broke completely and Pater couldn’t fix it. We haven’t been able to listen to the radio for a long time now.”
Mem’s eyes clouded. Leen wanted to touch Mem’s cheeks, draw a finger gently over them the way Mem used to do to her, stroking her face and hair and lulling her to sleep. Go back to bed, she wanted to say. Go back to bed and stay there. When you wake up be my mother again. She understood why Tine sometimes sat outside the bedroom door, knitting or darning or sewing, some craft to keep her hands busy. But Tine wasn’t waiting. She didn’t need Mem to come out. She needed to keep watch.
“The sores are gone…” Mem started to say but then she stopped, unable to sustain the diversion. “Oh,” she gasped. She covered her face. The skin on her hands was so thin it looked like water, rippling over veins and old muscles, tendons.
“It’s okay,” Leen whispered, alarmed. Mem had traveled somewhere new and unfamiliar, and Leen didn’t want to follow her there. “It’s okay, Memmy.”
Mem grabbed the back of a chair and leaned heavily, a row of eight white knuckles straining against her skin. She said nothing, only cried. Someone in their house was always crying.
“Mem?” Leen reached out to cover the bright knobs of bone that looked like they could split right open across the top of Mem’s hand. “It’s easy to be confused, it’s so late…”
“I dreamt of it,” Mem said. “Maybe I sleepwalked. I don’t know. It just made so much sense.” She looked at Leen’s knee and sat down abruptly. She gingerly peeled the nightgown up and saw the weeping scrapes. “Look at this. Look what I did to you.”
“No, no, no,” Leen tried to interject. Her voice broke on the last syllable. She couldn’t help the thought: yes, you did this. “Even if it had worked, you could’ve forgotten the board. Right? Anyone could’ve forgotten.”
“The electricity,” Mem said and Leen knew what she meant. You just didn’t forget a fact like that. The electricity had been cut off for years. “Where is my mind…I was so sure. I was so sure I could just turn the dials and I could find something out–” She stopped, shaking her head with a bitterness Leen hadn’t seen in Mem yet. She’d only seen confusion and sadness and willful delusion. The frustration washed visibly over Mem’s face, lucidity mixing with the confusion of the sleep–deprived, of a damaged soul. Mem adjusted herself and wiped her hands over her cheeks. It was quiet, the only sounds their breathing and the emerging ticking of the clock.
“Poppie,” Mem said. Her voice sounded new. It was not her mother speaking but a woman, a woman Leen was familiar with, but not one she knew. She wanted the old Mem, she needed her; not this person who angered her, drew out her pity, mixing both of these feelings into a taut, concentrated bead that pulsed in her now, at the top of her knee.
“Leen,” Mem said, “I cannot go on much longer. I don’t know if I can last.”
“Mem!” Leen said, alarmed. “Don’t say that. It’s almost over. That’s what everyone says, that the war can’t last much more.”
Mem shook her head with a new store of bitterness. “I’m not talking about that. It’s that too, but…” Her head dropped. She whispered, “I can’t pray. I can’t even pray. I can’t talk to God. I don’t think He’s there.”
“He’s there, Mem, God is here,” Leen said, stumbling. She knew intimately the language of their religion but they never talked like this. They didn’t question beliefs. They didn’t question where God was in relation to their prayers. Leen believed what she had always been taught. God was everywhere and He was watching, you could not hide. You prayed to God and you feared God. You did what was right because that was what God required. You went to church and you prayed and you feared it all, deep down, but you never, ever gave it up altogether. That was a sin of no return.
“Then why?” Mem’s head shot up. “Why? Why? What did we do? What did I do? My husband is gone. My husband is gone.”
“We don’t know–”
“He’s gone, Leentje! I can’t pray to a God who takes away husbands and children. It’s been too long. How long has it been now? So many months. Doeval, doeval, doeval, I don’t even know where I am anymore. And see? I say that word, doeval, that bad word I tell you not to say, and nothing happens. It’s a silly word and I know my children say it. I hear you. But why? Why does this matter? My husband is gone.” That voice, Mem’s strange voice; Leen didn’t want to hear it anymore. She wanted the confused Mem back, the one who laid in bed and didn’t say such terrible words. Leen prayed silently, Dear God, what do I say?
His answer was to cry. It started in her shoulders, circles of racking sobs that made her shake. “You don’t know that, Mem,” she said. The insides of her nose swelled and her thoughts muddied with the strength of her grief. “Please don’t say that.”
Almost immediately Leen’s weeping evaporated, as if some internal clock sensed this was all she could release now, saving up the depths of her feelings for the time when all things were final and they knew what was the same and what was forever changed.
“Do you still pray?” Mem asked.
“Yes,” Leen whispered. It was true. She didn’t pray how she was supposed to, though. Sometimes she stared at the sky, defying God by not bowing her head. She looked straight at the roof, the ceiling, whatever was between her and heaven, her eyes open while saying single words like, “Please.” Sometimes she said, “Help me” and didn’t first offer her praise. She didn’t always ask for her sins to be forgiven. But all the same, she talked to God.
“Then you must do it for me.”
Leen shut her eyes. She’d never prayed for someone, not like this, when she was the author, the one in charge, and her leg ached but not as badly as her throat, thick with the unformed words damming up behind her tongue. She bowed her head and began to whisper, trying to shame away the feelings of awkwardness and the anger over caring for Mem while it was she who was hurt. The formal opening of Pater’s prayer she could not remember and so all she could do was plead, to pour out just what it was she most wanted to know.
“Please, Lord God, please let Pater be alive. Please let him come home soon. Please, Lord, we are sorry for all our sins. We miss our father. Please God, please let Pater be alright.” Her throat tightened even more, not in an effort to squelch the words but because her need was so strong. She felt it tingle in her hands as she squeezed them together, tighter with each phrase. “Oh, please, God, please, let Pater come home. Please. Please.”
Leen stopped. She looked at Mem, who was watching her plainly, her hands unclasped.
Mem sighed. “Thank you.” Her voice broke. That strange, cold, womanly tone was gone, and her old voice returned. It sounded high, lilting, a weak frequency difficult to make out. She whispered, “I asked that he hear your prayer.”