by Tessa de Loo
While they were disappearing behind the mirror upstairs – those who coincided with their mirror image neutralized themselves and ceased to exist – Lotte’s father went to take the pulse, as his job permitted him to leave the house after curfew. On going out he discovered the front door had vanished; he retrieved it undamaged in the meadow. The other members of the family had to create the illusion of an ordinary Christmas celebration in case there was going to be a house search. The plates of the people in hiding were taken away – they were sitting crestfallen behind the cold turnips; the candles flickered and dripped in the draught. A chilly wind blew through the curtains; now and then a piece of glass fell to the floor. They sat round the table like actors waiting for the curtain to rise. Lotte was aware that it was a long time since they had been by themselves – it seemed that they had forgotten how to be like that. Covertly she looked at her mother, who was still the linchpin. She was sitting bolt upright … she still puffed her chest out against the wolf and kept her cubs from his jaws … But the chestnut glow had disappeared from her pinned-up hair, even the tortoiseshell comb had dulled. Somewhere during the war she had begun to go grey and to abandon some of her invincibility. A strong gust of wind blew all the candles out. The door was thrown open, her father came in. ‘They can all come down,’ he said, ‘it was a bomb. Where’s the gin?’ After he had knocked back the contents of his glass in one gulp he told them that a stray bomb had blown a deep crater in the lawn of a nearby eighteenth-century manor house. The neoclassical entrance porch had been rammed into the salon, pillars and all; the lady of the house, who had gone to stand by the window to see where the row was coming from, had been taken away screaming with her eyes full of glass.
Life narrowed down to survival – the increasingly frequent poaching expeditions inclined more and more to the demonic. Lotte and Jet, Marie and Lotte foraged about the tip of the province of North Holland from farm to farm like peddlers with linen, rings, strings of pearls, watches, brooches, light-headed with hunger. On the gate a placard said ‘We don’t give out water’. The dog was set on them. Somewhere people were threshing – uninvited onlookers waited patiently until a few grains fell by the wayside. A nasty polar wind raced across the frozen fields, the ice groaned in the ditches and canals. Near the Afsluitsdijk the road passed a German outpost. To comfort the hungry hordes who were stumbling by with the promise of a better world, a world of plenty, the officers had put the dining-table outside – ostentatiously they sat at their steaming plates piled high with vegetables and sausage, the buttons burst off their uniforms from the guzzling. Lotte looked at it with a dry mouth. By means of an intricate psychological manoeuvre she forged the inflamed feelings of hate into contempt, which was more bearable on an empty stomach.
There were generous farmers too, who gave food and drink to passers-by and laid out straw sacks in the stables. The most cynical stayed awake at night to rob their dozing companions; as a matter of course Lotte slept with her head on the jumper in which the jewels were wrapped. When they had already given up all hope on the way back, in the Beemster, their sacks were filled with potatoes by a farmer’s wife who refused to accept an item in exchange. To return home with full bags was the only triumph on earth still worth achieving. In Amsterdam they crossed the IJ by the ferry – a thick chilly mist was hanging over the water. WA men turned up to search through the passengers’ bags. Jet and Lotte made themselves small – depriving them of the potatoes would rob them of their souls as well. A boy of about eight was standing by the handrail; his worn-out trousers flapped round his legs. There was a resigned expression on the sharp old man’s face beneath his cap. He had a cart, its load covered by a piece of sailcloth, yet the approaching inspection seemed to leave him cold. He was staring out over the IJ into the mist; screeching seagulls were emerging out of it. He saw no reason to turn as the two uniforms came up to him decisively. ‘Young man,’ said one of them ironically, ‘would you be so kind as to lift up that sail so that we can look at the cargo?’ The boy looked ahead impassively, motionless. ‘Looks like he’s a bit deaf.’ They became impatient. ‘Lift that sail up!’ Lotte’s throat went thick with rage. He is a child, leave him in peace, she wanted to shout, but the potatoes disabled her tongue. ‘Get a move on, lout, do what I say!’ The boy leaned over stiffly, a thin wrist came out of the frayed sleeve as he gripped a corner of the sail and dutifully pulled it back. Beneath it lay a dead man, with bent legs – emaciated, with hollow eye sockets and ears sticking out from his bony skull. His body was strangely twisted midway, as though it had snapped. ‘Who is that …?’ said the guard, vainly trying to make his question sound like an order. ‘My father,’ said the boy flatly. He drew the sail back and stared across the water again. Fragments from ‘Der Erlkönig’ came back to Lotte. The boy was the representation of the opposite: ‘… it is the child with his father … in his arms the father was dead …’
It started snowing a week later. Misery hid beneath unspoilt whiteness; from the air the occupied north seemed to be united with the liberated south, thanks to the snow. The iron stove in the studio fed with damp kindling gave out more black smoke than heat. Ernst tried to keep the plane under control in his numbed fingers, forced to squint through his sooted-up glasses. ‘And meanwhile at home in Utrecht I still have sacks of coal,’ he grumbled. Lotte volunteered to fetch them; he did not refuse her offer, convinced as he was of her indestructibility. She set off – she made her way through the snow with the bicycle, pausing now and then to take a sip from the beetroot stew her mother had given her to take in a small pan. It snowed again from time to time, she made slow progress, the little flakes stung her face. Bent forwards she pushed the heavy bicycle onwards, her consciousness solely on that one radiant point of coal glowing on the horizon, which was already spreading heat into her spirit. Outside of that there was only the white void, absolute desolation. Her hands and feet froze away; the cold penetrated in from those extremities and settled itself within in a not unpleasant heaviness. She had no idea how long she had already been on the road, how far she still had to go. Every notion of time dissolved in the abstraction of all-encompassing whiteness – a benevolent peace descended upon her. Clods of snow stuck to her lace-up shoes; the contours of a lumpy fort were vaguely revealed in a snowy expanse of white through a fine network of crystals that had settled on her eyelashes. An irresistible temptation emanated from a tree with white branches like a photographic negative: a brief repose. She leaned the bicycle against the trunk and let herself sink into the snow, a soft blanket beneath her and soon covering her. She could not finish a single thought any more – like white butterflies they fluttered through her heaviness. All contradictions and paradoxes dissolved in a woolly nothing; she vaguely remembered a corresponding perception from long ago, when she sank through the ice and a few seconds stretched into an eternity. She forgot that she had a body. The sound of falling snow … was the last thought before she sank away into a ruthless, delightful oblivion.
‘Come … if you lie there you’ll die …’ Someone was pulling her roughly by the arm back to reality. The snow slid off her. She was too far gone to resist. The bicycle was pushed into her hands. ‘I’ll walk with you …’ She walked like a wound-up mechanical doll, accompanied by a man in a long black coat with a snowy hat. He was breathing heavily – the only sound to be heard as they trudged onwards. He asked nothing, said nothing, but confined himself to brief exhortations when the pace slackened. ‘Keep walking …’ She had the sense of being on the threshold of an important memory, but one which could not break through the screen of her dullness. It was already dark when the town loomed up and they trudged along empty streets to the centre. At the Fish Market he suddenly took his leave of her by removing his hat, piles of snow falling from it … it seemed again as though the shadow of a memory was catching her unawares as a dark street swallowed him up.
Only then did she realize that the one she was staring at had saved her life. He had turned up out of nowhere like a deus
ex machina – he had disappeared again into it as though he were no more than a hallucination. It had stopped snowing. The town was deserted, the snow lay on a few corpses in the shelter of a wall, hunger had left clear traces behind on their upturned faces. An astonished landlady let her in. His rooms were still intact; his possessions, mainly books about violin-making and family portraits, were waiting stoically for his return – she looked at them as she slowly came to the right temperature. The only thing missing from the interior was the coal. The landlady, who cleaned the rooms, gave herself away in the exaggeration of her denial. Coal? No, if there had been any coal she would have known about it. Lotte could not prove anything. She spooned the last remains of beetroot stew out of the pan and crept into his narrow, chilly bed.
10
‘Œufs à la neige’ is the poetic name of a dessert that was a means of conquering hunger with air during the war. At that time Lotte got cramp in her wrists by whisking up the miracle of the age from the whites of two eggs into an ever-expanding foam.
‘I made that for the children in the hunger winter,’ said Lotte, spooning one of the islands out of the vanilla sauce, ‘to chase away the empty feeling in their stomachs.’
Anna sighed. ‘I did not know that you had endured so much hunger.’
‘It was a better weapon than the V1,’ said Lotte curtly.
Anna switched tactically to another subject. ‘And you were almost snowed up … I recognize the feeling of absolute desolation in the midst of nature, which is essentially indifferent … and the longing for death that can assail you against the background of the war …’
The doctors and nurses turned up the day after they had arrived at the seminary and it was business as usual with normal equipment. Herr Töpfer, who was already in the convalescent phase, asked official permission for Sister Anna to accompany him on his practice walks in the garden. They walked very slowly between the snowdrops and budding hazels. There was a watery sun. They rested on a mossy bench. ‘Sister, it’s over with us,’ Töpfer stated mercilessly. ‘Up to now the pendulum still swung back and forth to the east, to the west, but now it has come to a halt in the middle – they are advancing from all sides and will crush us.’ ‘We still have the V2 …’ Anna interposed. ‘You don’t really believe that, Sister. It simply is finished. My parents, my wife, my children – they are all hoping for my return, but when the Russians come they will shoot all the SS here.’ Anna nodded mechanically – the Russians’ revenge was proverbial. The SS were even recognizable naked by their tattooed blood group on their arms. She looked around. Soon the snowdrops would be trampled under Russian boots. A sense of fear came over her for the first time, not for herself but for the wounded whom she was trying to patch up, and for whom she sacrificed her night’s sleep. ‘Ach Sister …’ the sombre Töpfer held her by the chin and looked at her dolefully, ‘we had such beautiful dreams.’
The feeling of approaching calamity no longer left her alone, it was difficult to wait calmly and yet not to wait. At any rate, waiting calmly for the collapse of the Third Reich was not on for the boy with the pistol. Anna kept her eye on him, waiting for the opportunity to filch it off him. She went to sit on the edge of his bed in between her duties and listened to his feverish plans that concealed his inability to face up to the fiasco of his ideals. He had been active in the Hitler Youth even when it was illegal; he had lost an eye in a street fight with communist youths. With his flair he had reached officer rank in the Wehrmacht – even though he was in the military hospital with a shattered knee he was not contemplating capitulation! One night as he slept, Anna carefully removed the pistol from beneath his pillow. She threw it into the Danube with relief. The next day she went to sit with him with an innocent expression. He grasped her hand, his eye shone. ‘Sister,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘come with me to the Werewolf!’ She shook her head. He aroused her pity with his naïve fantasies about the Werewolf movement, a group of desperadoes who were withdrawing to the Alps to continue the fight to the death. ‘You’re crazy, Junge, it’s over,’ she said softly. ‘If you are right I will shoot myself in the head,’ he cried vigorously. ‘They won’t get their hands on me alive.’ To demonstrate that he meant it he rummaged under his pillow. The emptiness he found there enraged him – where was the thief who had stolen from him the right to decide on his own life? He twisted himself out of his bed and limped through the ward with a flushed face and clenched jaw, dragging the leg with the shattered knee behind him. Anna barred his way. ‘Stop screaming! The pistol is in the Danube. I took it, no one else did. Your father and mother asked me to, I promised them I would.’ The one eye stared at her in bewilderment. He stiffened and clenched his fists: she must not see the shuddering tension suppressed in his body – then he burst into tears. His lust for battle collapsed; he crumpled up as though she had given him a beating – leaning heavily on her he allowed himself to be led willingly back to his bed.
The war quickened. The front was just twenty-five kilometres away from Linz. A night-time transport to Germany was improvised for all the patients who could move at all or who could somehow be carried. All reported except twelve patients with serious back injuries – they could only lie on their fronts. Anna was given the task of watching over them that night. Moved, she went to say goodbye to her old patients from Vienna. ‘Open that box a moment …’ ordered Herr Töpfer, pointing with his crutch. Anna fiddled with the lock; inside there was a packet on top. ‘Take it out and lock the box again please.’ She obeyed his instructions carefully. Her heart was thudding: it was as though he had been watching over her all that time – now he was going away. ‘Come …’ he beckoned, ‘come with me.’ In a recess in the long cold corridor he opened the packet. His hands were trembling. ‘Listen carefully. I am giving this to you, it is chocolate. I had been keeping it for my wife but I think you can make better use of it now. We are all leaving, tonight you will be all alone: eat the chocolate then, you will need it.’
He had prescience. That night as the seminary emptied silently, Anna sat by the light of a candle near the twelve wounded whom she recognized by the nature of their injuries, not by their faces. She sat there and obeyed Töpfer’s last order: she ate herself into a delirium with his chocolate so that it would not strike her that they had all absconded. By morning she emerged from her stupor. Wobbling from tiredness and nausea she stumbled out of the ward. The seminary seemed just as deserted as on the night they had arrived: the doctors had disappeared, the nurses with their bandages and the medicines, even the caretaker in his silk pyjamas had fled the sinking ship. A solemn, almost pious, silence prevailed – was this the silence that preceded the ultimate slaughter, like the squalls that presaged thunderstorms, an oppressive, charged silence? What was she doing in this godforsaken spot, far from home? Far from home? She had no home, there was nothing to long for, no fireside, no apple orchard … no one waiting for her with yearning. She heard the echo of her footsteps on the tiles as though she were chasing herself. Each cavernous room that she went in to emphasized her solitude … a house with empty rooms from a dream, every room led on to yet another empty room … ‘Sister …’ the wail of the patients who had been entrusted to her like terminally ill babies drove her back to the ward. But she could neither relieve their pain nor cleanse their wounds – she had nothing but some pieces of paper at her disposal to wipe away the pus, as she calmed them with hollow words. Thoughts, ideas, perceptions went through her without touching any other emotional thread but morose long-suffering. The day slipped through her, gradually changing into evening, and still no one came to take her place. Had they been forgotten by everyone? Did they not appear in any plan, no single scheme? Had they already been crossed out? The electricity had stopped a week earlier, they had managed with candles – these too had been taken away. She sat at her post in the dark. You might have thought they were already dead. Although there were thirteen of them, each one of them was alone and fighting against despair in his own way. It was clear that she had
come to the end of her peregrinations; this was the point all lines had been leading to. Her soap bubble burst and left an emptiness behind where only the smell of dying soldiers hung.
But she was not alone. A familiar companion of old emerged: he was trustworthy, a precise allure emanated from him that suited the circumstances. He did not burden you with an unreliable strategy for living, he laughed at all the senseless striving, he asked nothing, demanded nothing … the only thing he desired from her was that she did not resist him. She left the ward without looking round; she picked up one of the suitcases, which contained baby clothes. Hypnotized, she walked outside, went down to the river. The Danube was black. She hesitated: if she went in from the bank she would not be able to prevent herself swimming. She walked up onto the middle of the Baroque bridge. I promised you that I would not do it, she murmured, forgive me. The words dissolved into the sound of the rain. The bridge was there, and the water beneath it, and the promise of peace that lay enclosed there. She lifted the suitcase up onto the balustrade, which came up to her shoulders, and tried to pull herself up. But the mossy stone edge was wet and slippery; she could not get a grip and suddenly lacked the strength in her arms, which used to be so tough in the old days. Once again she tried, and again … she scrabbled up and slid back again … She refused to resign to failure … how could something as banal as the balustrade of a bridge stand in the way of a matter of life and death? In frustration she seized the suitcase and flung it over into the depths below. What worked for the suitcase would work for her too. But the balustrade was just a bit high and slippery everywhere. Up there, there was laughter at her ludicrous efforts: Anna, always so resolute and efficient, went about her suicide so pitifully and clumsily!