The walk back to the Wijmans’ was a thoughtful one. What if the Wijmans knew somehow that she had seen Sofie? How would she keep Sofie’s hiding place a secret? She could only hope that the Klaassens had not returned, and that if they did see the Wijmans again, they would be too ashamed to tell what they had done to Sofie. That would mean they wouldn’t mention seeing Lena either. Even in her most desperate fantasy, though, she couldn’t imagine the zeal she had seen on the platform turning to shame in a single hour.
Vrouw Wijman greeted her at the door. “What have you done with her?” she asked. “The little slut,” she added.
Lena’s gut constricted. Vrouw Wijman moved her arm aside and let Lena pass. She walked through the lean-to, stepped up into the kitchen and stopped. Her desperate fantasy resolved itself into nothing.
Mevrouw and Meneer Klaassen were sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea.
Lena gazed at the three adults and composed herself. Calm seeped into her, all of her: torso, limbs, skull, face. Her heart slowed to a normal pace. She opened her mouth.
“I tried to help her,” she said. “I tried. But people followed us, and they pulled her away. They took her. I don’t know where. What did they do to her?” Her brow wrinkled. A tear slid down her cheek. She marvelled at herself. “You are cruel, cruel people,” she said, speaking the truth now. And she marched through the kitchen and into the alcove that had become Sofie’s, letting the curtain swing shut behind her.
She collapsed onto the bed, and the next thing she knew, the curtain was shoved aside and Bennie was on the bed with her, burrowing into her arms. Real tears flowed then. And she did not hear what was exchanged at the kitchen table while she wept.
The story came out at dinner that night, everyone sitting down together now that Sofie was gone. The Klaassens had left in a huff when Vrouw Wijman resisted turning Lena into the street. Lena figured that she had Bennie to thank for that.
Vrouw Wijman reported to her husband what the Klaassens had told her, and Lena repeated her own story about the people taking Sofie away. She felt the same calm again and was rewarded with the same convincing tears.
“We’ve got to find her,” she said as they all stared at her. “What have they done to her?”
She saw doubt in their faces, even Annie’s. And then Annie spoke. “I’ll help you look for her,” she said.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Vrouw Wijman said. “She may have been good with the silver polish, but she was a bad girl and we’re well rid of her.”
“Yes,” her husband said. “You will stay in the house tonight, both of you.” And he looked at Lena in a way that she did not like.
If only she could run away too, to stay in the shed with Sofie and wait, but she could not. This house was their source of food. They could not both go into hiding.
She got up and started to wash the dishes, her thoughts tumbling. Annie joined her. As Lena reached for a plate, Annie thrust her hand out at the same time. She touched Lena’s wrist. Lena turned and met her eyes. Annie’s brows thrust upward in a question. Lena gave a single nod.
“I’ll help you with that,” Annie said loudly, brightly, as she lifted a platter into the dishwater. Lena knew that she did not mean the platter.
Almelo was alive with excitement far into the night. The noise was mostly joyful and now and again just a little scary. Lena quailed at the thought of venturing out into the dark, but it had to be done. The thought of Sofie alone in that shed appalled her.
The Wijmans, it seemed, were not big on celebration. They went to bed early, claiming exhaustion. Annie led the way up the stairs. Lena was already in Bennie’s room, telling him his favourite bedtime story. She left the softly snoring body, whispered goodnight through Annie’s doorway in what she hoped was a suggestive tone and made her way down to the kitchen. Earlier in the evening, under Vrouw Wijman’s instruction, she had moved her suitcase out of Annie’s room and back into the alcove. She had already bundled up the two spare blankets from the train, along with a skirt, blouse and sweater, and had thrust the bundle under the bed. Sofie still had Lena’s coat and scarf, and luckily, when they humiliated her up on that stage, they had not removed her shoes or stockings.
Lena got the bundle, pushed the curtain aside and started. There stood Annie, candle in hand. “I’ll get a basket for food,” she said. And Lena nodded.
For the next ten minutes, they worked almost without speaking.
Thus began a nightly routine. When she could, Lena visited Sofie during the day as well, but she brought little food at those times. At night, she and Annie packed only what would never be missed. They squirreled away bits of their meals into pockets, scooped bits of stew into jars, sliced scraps off loaves of bread. Any hint that food was disappearing would instantly reveal what they were up to; Sofie would be discovered, Lena would be turned out and they would be run out of town.
Lena could not imagine Sofie’s hours in that shed. She and Annie worked also at alleviating her boredom. They brought her books, one at a time, and paper and pencils. Lena never saw her write, but she imagined the love letters mounting into stacks, the writing smaller and smaller as Sofie tried to make full use of the bits of paper Lena brought her. And she hoped and prayed that Sofie would have the sense to stay put.
Thus two weeks passed.
“I could go for a walk,” Sofie said one day as Lena sat opposite her idling away a spare hour.
Lena jumped to her feet. “No, you could not,” she said, her voice almost a bark.
“I … I need to get out of here. I can’t—”
“You need no such thing!” Lena was shouting now. “It’s not safe. You know it’s not safe.”
“Easy for you, going to a nice warm house every day, and a bed.” Sofie’s voice dwindled, and she mumbled something that Lena did not understand.
Lena collapsed back onto the straw. “What?” she demanded.
“I need Uli,” Sofie said, her voice a whimper now.
“If it wasn’t for Uli, you would have the warm bed and the nice meals. If it wasn’t for Uli, the evil Klaassens would be your sweet new mummy and daddy!”
Sofie mumbled again. Then she looked up at Lena, opened her mouth and spoke. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
And that brought silence.
At last Lena said, “You are not. Or at least, you can’t be sure.”
“I’m pretty sure,” Sofie said. “I’m late, and I just feel it, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t feel any of the normal things. No cramps, for one.”
Lena had no response to this news. It was too much. She just would not respond. She could not. She would not.
“I have to go,” she said.
“But, Lena.”
“I said I have to go. I’ll be back tonight. And NO WALKS!” With that, she strode out of the shed, almost tempted never to return.
She did return, of course, that very night, with Annie, although she did not share Sofie’s news, not then. They brought Sofie food and drink, chatted for a few minutes and made their way home. Annie commented on Lena’s silence, and Lena shrugged.
Back in the house, Annie whispered goodnight. Lena stood and listened to her quiet footsteps on the stairs. Then she pushed aside her curtain, stepped into her alcove and sat down on the bed. The air felt different in there somehow, she thought, and the bed was lower or something. She had no time to make sense of these thoughts before her mind exploded in terror as a hand clamped down on her mouth.
“Do not make a sound,” Wijman said into her ear, and he removed his hand.
Instinct made Lena do as she was told, but she lunged off the bed, intent on escape, only to find that the grip on her mouth had shifted to an iron grip on her arm. She was yanked back to her spot on the bed, now with Wijman’s body right up against hers.
“So where are you keeping her?” he asked, again right into her ear.
Lena shrank into herself.
“I s
aid, where are you keeping her?” he repeated, his voice sharp and breathy, his fingers twisting her forearm.
“I … I don’t know what you mean,” Lena said. Her voice shook, but she could not help that.
He let go of her arm and turned from her to light the candle beside the bed. She did not try to flee. Where could she go?
In the flickering light of the candle, he turned back to her. “You don’t have to tell me. In fact, I don’t even want to know.” He paused and she watched him, disgust and terror warring with that calm place inside her that was busily forming a plan. “I want something else,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You can’t. I can’t …”
“Yes,” he said, “you can. Either that or we’ll go together and get Sofie and turn her over to the authorities. I don’t know where you’ve got her, but I doubt she would prefer prison.”
Lena looked at him for a long moment. She let her shoulders drop. “All right,” she said, and she put her hands over her eyes and let out a small whimper of fear.
He reached for her.
“No, wait,” she said. “Let me …” She stood and began to unbutton her sweater, keeping her eyes downcast. From under her lashes, she saw him sink back onto the bed, his back against the wall, watching her. She undid another button.
Then she turned and shot from the alcove, across the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs, silent and fast. Behind her, Wijman grunted in surprise and anger, and she knew he was following, but once she was on the stairs, what could he do? She slid into Annie’s room and knelt beside her bed.
“I need to come back in with you,” she whispered to the sleeping girl, and Annie mumbled and moved over. Lena crawled in beside her. She listened then and heard his step on the stairs. The footsteps stopped outside Annie’s door, the door opened and Lena sensed him peering inside. After a moment, the figure in the doorway withdrew and the door closed.
“What happened?” Annie whispered, still not fully awake.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Lena said, then she shocked herself by falling asleep in minutes, Sofie’s pregnancy and Wijman’s lechery turning to the stuff of dreams.
Lena did not tell Annie what had happened, not in words. “I need to sleep with you again,” she whispered the next morning when they found themselves briefly alone in the kitchen.
Annie looked at her. “Did he hurt you?” she said at last.
Lena pushed up her sleeve and held out her arm.
“Only this,” she said, and they both gazed at the bruises his four fingers had left behind. She flipped her wrist, revealing the larger thumb-shaped mark on the other side of her arm.
Annie met her eyes. “It’s not safe for you here,” she said.
“I know, but we need to eat, Sofie and me. The war’s got to be over soon, everywhere. It’s got to.”
The smallest nod and Annie turned back to peeling potatoes. Vrouw Wijman was on her way down the hall, Bennie in tow.
Lena watched Wijman closely after that on the rare occasions when he was in the house, and she took roundabout routes to Sofie’s hiding place. He pushed past Lena roughly whenever he had the chance, muttering obscenities at her, but Vrouw Wijman, Lena noticed, was watching him too. Lena was pretty sure that his threat to turn Sofie in was words, nothing more.
With her pregnancy more certain every day, Sofie talked of nothing but Uli and the coming baby, alternating between enraptured imaginings of the family she would soon have and terror that Uli would come for her and be captured or leave without finding her.
Over and over again, Lena and Annie promised to be on the lookout, to bring him to her or her to him the instant he was spotted. Once, Lena ventured to suggest that he might not be able to come. “He could be a prisoner,” she said, “or he could have been sent far away. There’s still fighting in Germany, you know. And in the west,” she added, thinking once again of her own family.
Those words brought glares and fierce denials, all the fiercer for the knowledge in all their hearts that the baby’s father could well be dead.
“He loves me,” Sofie told Lena more times than she could count. “He will come.”
Lena had other things to think about. For her, liberation meant an end to her barely begun Resistance work. Annie took her out one day to meet the tall, thin man at the house in the country. Two Jewish families were there too, on their way back to what was left of their homes. They had benefited from her ration cards, she learned, and she felt pride and humility all mixed together. The matchbox, it turned out, had contained tiny rolled-up bits of paper with signals in code to be communicated by radio to Britain. If she had known that when the German officer was taking his cigarette, she was sure she would have fainted from fear, although she was glad to learn that the message was concealed under a false bottom in the box, which did contain matches.
She thought about Piet. Was he all right? Resistance work had to be more dangerous in Amsterdam. And freedom was so slow in coming to the west. She imagined the corpses piling higher every day. She imagined the German soldiers, cut off, angry. What might they be doing to people? She woke up from dreams of gunshots and bomb blasts. It was as if she were really hearing the guns and bombs, not dreaming them.
In late April, they heard of food drops near Amsterdam, and then, within two days of each other, the two dictators were dead, Mussolini shot in Milan and Hitler killed, many said by his own hand, in Berlin.
Five days after that, it came. The end. The war was over. Amsterdam was free.
Wijman showed little expression when he heard the news on the wireless. He had come home with the radio the day after Almelo’s liberation, so they heard daily reports of the progress of the war. Now, as joy blossomed in her heart, Lena observed Wijman’s indifference. His own freedom was what had counted. And he already had that, or thought he did.
He looked at Lena across the table. “You’ll go,” he said.
She held his gaze. “Yes,” she said. “May I have a day to prepare?”
He frowned and looked at his wife.
“Come on, Father. You can’t just put her out on the street.” That was Annie.
“We can and we will,” said Vrouw Wijman. “But you have your day, girl. Beyond that, it’s up to you.”
“I will leave first thing tomorrow,” Lena said firmly, while her mind screamed, What about Sofie?
She left through the lean-to and wandered alone to the Almelo House grounds. Excitement was everywhere, people rejoicing at freedom for their nation and for the world. May had arrived, bringing warmth and sunshine. Everywhere was a riot of flowers, the earth itself in celebration.
Lena lay down on a warm, grassy slope and thought. She must return home. She longed to see Piet and Margriet and especially Bep and Nynke. Surely the food parcels had arrived safely and her family had all survived.
But what was Sofie to do, marked by the stubbly growth on her head, pregnant, longing for her German soldier? What was Lena to do about Sofie?
Minden, Sofie had said. That was where Uli’s parents were. It had not been bombed like Düsseldorf. If Uli did not come for her, Sofie was determined to go to Minden. But how? The Allies were taking control of all of Germany. Minden might not have been hit directly, but the whole country was in ruins, with everyone starving, desperate. They had just lost a war.
Sarah flashed into Lena’s mind. Lena sat up abruptly and hunched over, her hands knotted between her knees. She could not hold Sarah and Sofie together in her mind. Was she supposed to accompany Sofie to Germany where Sarah and her family likely died? To stay in hiding with her here? Or should she drag her, kicking and screaming, back to Amsterdam?
She smiled wryly through her tears. Sofie was beginning to feel more like a millstone than a friend! Lena hoisted herself to her feet and set off for the shed. One decision had mostly settled itself in her mind: she was returning to Amsterdam, with or without her millstone.
Lena stared at Sofie. They had opened the shed door and ventured out into t
he sunshine, just out of sight of the road, where they sat, side by side, backs against a stone wall.
Sofie, it seemed, had it all worked out! “It’s not so far, Minden. Straight east. There’s been bombing near there, Uli told me, but not the town itself. I’m to go to his parents, he said, and he’ll meet me there when he can.”
“Sofie, you have no idea. They’ve just lost a war! Minden could have been bombed since you saw Uli. There’s been a lot more bombing since then. Haven’t you heard the planes?” Lena said.
Sofie paused. “I know,” she said. “I know. But it isn’t far, and his parents know I’m coming.”
She was gearing up to start babbling again, Lena could see. “You don’t even know if they’ll let you across the border,” she said.
“I’ll show them Uli’s letter. He wrote it all down for me, you know. I … I’ll just keep trying. Or I’ll sneak across. I’m just one girl. There’ve got to be lots and lots of people on the move now. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, Sofie. I don’t even know what it will be like to travel back to Amsterdam!”
Lena thought about Albert for a moment. She tried to imagine going east into the unknown, the defeated country of their enemy, on the chance that she would be able to find him and build a life with him. Her memory of Albert was warm, and she thought it might be nice to hear from him one day. But she did not feel the burning passion that drove her friend. Sofie might weep and whine a lot, and she didn’t think about others much, but she did have courage—courage and commitment.
At the moment, Lena was most excited at the likelihood (she hoped it was a likelihood!) that she would soon see Bep and Nynke. Every moment she spent with Bennie had made her long for the chance to show the two of them just how much she loved them. Romance would have to wait.
“Well, if you must, you must,” she told Sofie, just as Annie came pelting around the corner and hunkered down beside them.
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