Finally he arrived at Jacob’s room. Mrs Wesseling made sure she preceded him and stood just inside the door, looking across at the bedstee. As he entered, she said quietly, ‘A guest. She’s sick.’
The soldier stopped in his tracks.
‘Sick?’ he said with alarm.
‘Tuberculosis,’ said Mrs Wesseling to him with a gesture of resignation, adding quietly, ‘Very bad, poor girl. No hope.’
Peering over the duvet, I saw the soldier’s nose twitch, as if he smelt the dread disease.
‘My God!’ he said, turning on his heel, and stomped out of the room and away down the stairs.
‘Stay there,’ Mrs Wesseling mouthed at me when he had gone, then followed after.
For some time I lay on top of Jacob in the bedstee before I heard the Germans driving away and Mrs Wesseling came panting up the stairs to tell me they had not discovered my brother and Dirk. How long this was—ten, fifteen minutes, more—I could not tell. Not because those were less time-tied days; clocks were not everywhere as they are today. But another reason kept from my mind any knowing of time or thought of the soldiers.
While the soldier was clattering about in the bedrooms I lay in the bedstee rigid with panic, trying to control my breathing, and fearful for my pounding heart. But when he gave up and went downstairs the relief was so great my bones turned to dough and I lay where I was, too weak to move, and my nightshift soaked with sweat. It was only then I became aware of Jacob’s body under mine, my weight pressing upon him, his head on its side under my left shoulder, his chest rising and falling as he breathed under my back, his angular hips beneath the swell of my buttocks, my legs stretched inside of his. I felt his warmth percolating through the clinging layers of our sweated nightwear, I felt the architecture of his bones, the cushioning of his muscles.
And because instinctively as I tumbled in upon him he had clasped his arms around my waist and held me firm, while I clutched the duvet close under my chin to ensure nothing of us was exposed but my face, we thus lay clamped together, at first conscious only of the danger stalking the rooms, then conscious only of our two bodies so closely pressed together. Never before had anyone held me like this, never before had I felt the intimate shape of a man’s body against my own. This itself would have been enough to startle me. Not that I disliked it, not at all. Indeed, while before my heart was beating with dreadful fear, now it beat with excitement. But then something else occurred, something even more startling. I felt Jacob’s sex swelling between my thighs. As if it were being inflated by a bicycle pump.
It would be wrong to say that I did not know what was happening, but it would also be wrong to say that I was entirely sure what it meant for me. What should I do? How should I respond?
This must seem to you inconceivable. Knowing, as young people, even children, now do, the sexual functions of the body, I can understand how it must seem to you impossible that a young woman of nineteen could be uncertain, if not ignorant, of a man’s stiffening penis. But so it was, and I must ask you to accept that what I felt was such a confusing mixture of surprise, an unfamiliar kind of aroused sensation in my body, and uncertain emotions about what I wished and what I ought to do, that there came over me a shyness so complete that I could not move but was as if paralysed, unable to respond as part of me wished to do without knowing precisely how, but neither able to flee as part of me felt I ought to do. All I could do was remain as I was, every cell of my body tingling as never before, intensely sensitive to my own and to Jacob’s body and to my own and his every smallest movement.
No more than this occurred. We lay moulded together in a suspended state of desire, me too shocked to remove myself and Jacob not daring to move lest he more embarrass himself and offend me, till Mrs Wesseling arrived and broke the spell, when I fled to my room, she calling after me the news of the others’ safety, for I was afraid my face would betray my feelings, and needed to calm myself in private before I dared look anyone in the eye again.
As for Jacob, poor man, he had not intended such arousal. Nature overrode human discretion, biology was to blame. Consider: a virile young man, for weeks away from home and after enduring for many days the stress and strain, highs and lows, of a fierce battle that sent some men mad, after being wounded, escaping the carnage, and then days of cosseted recovery nursed by a young woman attractive enough in her modest way. Consider he then suddenly finds himself pinned down in a narrow bed by this same young woman while danger and its removal stretches and relaxes his nerves and flushes adrenaline through his veins. How else would anyone expect this young man’s body to behave, except as a lion’s to a lioness after the hunt or as a seedling thrusts through winter ice in spring?
We had escaped by the skin of our teeth. I need not tell you that we were all badly shaken by the sudden arrival of the Germans, and by how they were so quickly upon us that we were almost caught with our feet in the ditch. Because of this, we agreed it was too dangerous to keep Jacob in the house any longer. He was well enough to be moved to the cowhouse hiding place. But so cramped would it be at night for the three of them that Dirk and Henk decided to take turns sleeping in one of the emergency hide-outs in the other farm buildings.
This change was made that very morning after the raid. And during the next few days I discovered what an unwelcome and unexpected difference it made to my life. For three weeks, first in our cellar at home and then at the farm, tending Jacob had been the main object of my attention. In fact, he had become the centre of my life. Some of us forget as we grow old how consuming can be the power of a young woman’s devotion. I have not. Perhaps because of what happened I have not been able to. Remembering those days I feel it still as keenly as I did then. Suddenly, no more than an hour after the few intense moments in the bedstee had brought to the surface thoughts, feelings, emotions, physical sensations that till then had moved, if they had stirred at all, only in the hidden depths of my being, suddenly he who had enlivened them, had fished them into view, was taken from me for the first time since he was brought to me unconscious in our cellar. What this abrupt separation meant to me I did not understand instantly during the next few hours, while we prepared the hiding place for him and carried him there, nor while I cleared up ‘his’ room in the house and laundered his bedclothes, nor during the rest of that day as I went about my routine chores, and carried his meals to him in the hiding place and sat with him while he ate. In that time there was too much to do, and the overhang of anxiety brought on by the raid numbed any thought of consequences. What I was most aware of then was relief that Jacob had not been captured and gladness that he was still with me.
But in the evening and especially while I lay in bed during the following night, I felt my deprivation. Felt his absence in the house, in the bedroom next to mine. He was not there for me to sit with after the day’s work. He was not there during the night to listen for should he need help. He was not there in the morning, alone in his room for me to wake with our tender ritual. And it was only in the night, after I had visited him in the hiding place to say goodnight, where I had found Dirk and Henk with him, drinking farm-brewed beer and smoking foul-smelling wartime cigarettes, the atmosphere so alien and unwelcoming of me, a woman—it was only then as I lay in my bed that the tears came. And when they dried up there came the fantasies of a girl’s first sexual longing. I felt again my body pressed down on his in the bedstee, felt his erection against my thigh, wished for the touch of his hands and the sound of his voice speaking softly in to my ear such words as those of the poem he had read to me from Sam’s book only the evening before.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By c
hance or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
For time-stretched minutes I beamed all my wishes towards him in the hiding place, willing him to come to me, silently, secretly, to join me in my bed. I knew he could not even climb down the ladder without help, never mind hobble from there to me, yet told myself he would do it somehow, being sure in the flush of my desire he could do anything if he felt for me as I felt for him. For longer minutes still I lay on my back waiting, urging him to me, and listening to every click and sigh of the sleeping house, holding my breath at any scantest sound that might signal his arrival, only to deflate in an agony of disappointment when it proved not.
I had little idea of exactly what I hoped he would do when we were together. Ignorance of possibilities and lack of any experience limited my imagination to the most obvious pleasures. All I knew was that I longed to have him beside me, to kiss and caress me, to speak to me words more intimate than any I had so far ever heard, to be wrapped around by him, held and folded into him. I had no words other than such blurred figures as these, learned I expect from my reading of romantic fiction, to tell myself of what I sensed I desperately desired.
And so that night I suffered the adult awakening which is such painful pleasure, made difficult for me because there was no one to whom I could talk about it. Had I been at home and the times been normal, I would have told my mother and shared my adventure with my closest friends. But my mother was out of reach, and my bosom friends were scattered who knew where? On the farm who was there? Only Mrs Wesseling, and I knew I could not trust her to understand and support me. So I had to keep my turmoil to myself. And thus I learned: nothing festers like a passion concealed.
That Jacob was taken from me was hurt enough. What made it worse was the change his move to the hiding place wrought in Jacob himself. So much in the company of Dirk and Henk, three young men confined together, he quickly became, as you say, ‘one of the boys’. A man brasher than the one I knew. Huddled all night in their bivouac of a den, they encouraged each other in bombast and bravado. Of course, this was inflamed by unspoken jealousy and competitiveness over me between Dirk and Jacob, which at the time I was blind to. Nor was it helped by the fact that Dirk could speak little English and Jacob no Dutch, so that Henk had to interpret for them both. Whenever I visited they teased me, as much to impress each other as to amuse me (as I pretended it did) or annoy me (which I pretended it did not). Oh, how boring is such boyness in grown men! My adored brother, my would-be suitor, my captivating soldier: I hated them all in this ugly reversive mood.
Four days went by, five, a week, two. Things got worse. The boy-men became boisterous, rowdy, impatient of their confinement.
One day towards the end of the second week there was an angry mood between Jacob and Dirk with Henk striving to keep the peace. They would not tell me what the matter was. Henk, who I asked about it when by ourselves, would only say that the trouble would pass. Perhaps, as I think was so, they had argued about me. Whatever the reason, Jacob began a regime of exercises to strengthen his wounded leg and to fitten him up again after his time in bed. But even this became a cause of competitiveness, and Dirk also started, as people say now, ‘working out’. Anything you can do I can do better, and more of and more than. I tried to remonstrate, fearing that Jacob’s wound might open up again, but he would not listen. He could not go on as he had been, he said; he must make his escape back to his own people.
I should explain you that the Allied advance in to Holland had not gone as quickly as we had expected and hoped. We heard news of the armies from our radio. But news of what was happening in the towns and villages around us we heard from people who called at the farm, begging for food, and from occasional letters from relatives and friends. This is how we learned that the Germans had completely evacuated Oosterbeek after the battle. Most of the village had been destroyed. But no one was allowed to visit what was left without special permission from the German authorities. Early in October a letter finally reached me from Mother. She and Father were living with Father’s cousins in Apeldoorn. She described how urgently the Germans were hunting for men aged between sixteen and fifty to work for them. Placards announced that they would be well paid and extra food rations would be given to their families. But few men turned up. Soon after, dead men were laid out at street corners, their bodies displaying the signs of torture, a notice pinned to their clothes on which was one word: Terrorist. This was intended to frighten everyone of course, and it did. Mother saw wagons full of men followed by long lines of men on foot guarded by a few soldiers. It was then that they took Father, though she did not tell me this at the time. He had given himself up to avoid reprisals against Mother or his cousins if he tried to hide and was found.
From others we heard that the same kind of thing had happened in Groningen, one of our most northerly cities, in Amersfoort in the heart of the country, west in the Hague, in Deventer near us here in the east. Everywhere. Now we understood what was meant when we heard on the English news that when the Allies liberated Maastricht, one of our southernmost cities, on the border with Belgium, there were hardly any men there at all. They had been taken not only as forced labour, but so that they could not help the British when they arrived.
As this news reached us in dribs and drabs, Dirk especially, but Henk too, became more and more angry, more and more frustrated because they were ‘shut away’, as they put it, doing nothing to help defeat the hated enemy who occupied our country and visited such suffering upon us. It was cowardly, they said, to remain so. Their boy-bluster soured to belligerence. While they went about their tasks on the farm, and at night in the stew-pot of their hideout, they concocted one plot after another by which to disrupt the Germans and kill them. They talked of homemade bombs designed to blow up German command posts, of lying in ambush for patrols, of stretching wires across country roads to disable soldiers on motorbikes or cycles. Anything at all, no matter how madcap it might be. Mr Wesseling urged them to be patient. The Allies would come soon, he said, and it was more important that young men like Dirk and Henk be there, ready to help rebuild our country after the liberation than that they gamble their lives in hazardous ventures of a kind better left to the experts in the Resistance. Mrs Wesseling pleaded with Dirk to listen to his father and to do nothing rash, and I with Henk, who I knew could influence Dirk if he felt strongly about something, but knew just as surely that he could be influenced by Dirk. They were always from their first meeting as small boys such inseparable bosom friends that what one did the other would do out of loyalty. And Henk, though the more intelligent and calm-headed, was also the more easy-going, and thus usually the one who was led rather than the leader. With Dirk so hot for action I feared for Henk’s welfare. While this was going on Jacob kept quiet, and wisely too, for had he taken my side he would only have inflamed Dirk the more.
All might have been well had we not been raided again, this time at dusk. It was a half-hearted affair. We saw them coming in good time for the boys to shut themselves away. The soldiers had their orders but we could tell they did not expect to find what they were looking for (men of an age to take away, we assumed). Instead, their officer hinted that they would give up without causing too much trouble if we handed over a few items of food of the scarcer sort. They left with a sack full of farmhouse cheese, eggs, a cake of butter, along with our unspoken but heartfelt scorn.
When Dirk heard of it he was furious, shouting at his father that giving in like this ensured we would be raided again in a few days when more would be demanded. And on and on it would go, worse each time. And if ever we refused, the place would be torn apart on the pretext of searching for
men, arms, illegal radios, whatever reason the officer felt like using. And if that happened, they would be certain to unload the hay from the cowhouse gallery, and the hiding place would be found.
‘You know how it is with them,’ he said. ‘Make them obey the rules or they despise you and do whatever they like with you. It’s against the rules for them to take food without official authorisation. They know that. Now we’ve broken the rules, we’ve given in to extortion and they’ll be back for more. We aren’t safe any longer.’
That night we went to bed despondent and worried.
Next morning Dirk and Henk had gone. They had taken Jacob’s gun and ammunition with them. And each had left a hastily written letter, Dirk to his parents, Henk to me. I still have my brother’s.
Dirk had scribbled a note at the end.
I never saw Henk again.
Beloved sister,
We cannot wait any longer. We must help rid our country of the invader. Dirk is right. The Germans will raid the farm more often now. Later, when the Allies are near, they will take it over as a command post or stronghold for a gun emplacement. If—no, when—that happens we would be caught. And then the Germans would treat us badly and you and the others too. Rats always behave worst when they are cornered. Better that Dirk and I go now while there is a chance of fighting rather than wait to be captured and killed or made to work for them. This is also the best thing for you. Less harm will come to you if we are not found here. For this reason also, help Jacob to leave as soon as he is fit enough. Do not delay.
Postcards From No Man's Land Page 15