by Bart van Es
On the left of the page in the album there is a snap of little Marianne, smiling proudly, balanced on a white wooden bench. The picture is taken outside Mrs. de Bruyne’s house, which stands directly across from number 10 on the other side of the street. Mrs. de Bruyne herself is sitting beside the toddler, looking on. In the album she is labeled “Fau Buyne” because that is how the one-year-old pronounces “Vrouw Bruyne,” and the name has caught on.
Fau Buyne, a widow, is a close friend of the family, and often looks after Marianne if Auntie needs to go out. She looks young but she already has a grown-up daughter who lives around the corner. Fau Buyne is part of the great network of friends and neighbors that reaches along and beyond the Bilderdijkstraat, people with the same sorts of jobs and the same small incomes, getting by as best they can.
There are two photographs on the page that do not feature family members. One, labeled “Annie Mookhoek,” is similar in style to the others and shows a slim, pretty girl in a checked dress and wearing thick socks and dark shoes. Again, the photographer has placed her, full length, at the center of the picture, where she stands, posing self-consciously, with her arms at her sides. There is a tangle of green scrubland around her, which has the odd effect of making her float free of the background, almost as if she were rising upward into the sky.
The bright sunshine makes the checked pattern of her dress blend with the patchwork of light and shadow. She seems to smile down from a great height. This smiling girl lives a few doors away and if Lien is not with Kees she is bound to be with Annie, playing street games, going off to the swimming pool, or exploring the countryside.
The final picture on this page is very different from the others. It is large and yellowed with rounded corners, and features a dark, sad-faced boy perhaps nine years old. It has been folded in half and has a chunk torn away from it at the bottom, its edges creased and eaten into like a parchment that is centuries old.
The pose is that of a formal portrait from the nineteenth century, with the boy’s head and shoulders carefully framed—the opposite of the clumsy snaps that cover the rest of the page. “Hansje” is written beneath in blue ballpoint pen. The torn chunk leaves a hole where the boy’s heart is, at exactly the point where a Jewish star would be fixed.
* * *
—
THE PEOPLE PICTURED ON THIS PAGE of the album are Lien’s everyday companions as the months pass in Dordrecht. Her crying, which started so suddenly, eases off over the weeks as she settles more and more into the routine of life in the Bilderdijkstraat. Nothing is said about such things in the family. In fact, nobody ever talks about feelings or mothers and fathers; Auntie and Uncle are just steady, dependable, and fair. If you fall over and scrape your knee, then Auntie will dab it with iodine, give you a kiss, and usher you off back outside.
There is always fun to be had with Kees or Annie or with the other children on the street. The games they play are a little bit different from the ones she is used to, but once you know the rules about how many steps to take, or how long you have to cover your eyes before you start running, or how many marbles you can hold at one time, then they are really just the same.
One afternoon in September when they are both in the kitchen, Lien asks Kees to write in her poesie album. At first she is afraid that maybe he will think it is all silly girl’s stuff, but he takes the book from her hands without saying anything and sits down at the table, for a long time just chewing the top of his pen. When eventually he starts writing his tongue sticks out a little from the corner of his mouth. She is allowed to look only when he has completely finished, and when she does so she finds both pages are filled with Kees’s best handwriting, which has little curls at the ends of the letters and sticks perfectly to the lightly drawn pencil lines.
He has spaced his words out so that sometimes you need to read from top to bottom and sometimes from corner to corner:
For—get
Me—not
Dog, cat, rat
Lientje is a
Treasure
Stay—safe
and—sound
till—you
weigh—500 pounds!
Good morning Monday.
How is Tuesday?
And say to Wednesday.
That next Thursday
I’ll take the Friday train
For a Saturday and Sunday stay.
To remind you
of
your
cousin
Kees
Almost all the letters are formed perfectly. It is only at the end of the word “Lientje” that the ink blots and thickens a little where Kees first wrote “Lien” and then added the “tje” onto the end of it—“tje” meaning “little one,” used for something or someone you hold dear.
Lien sees much less of Ali, who is too old now to play on the street and spends her time instead with her girlfriends, talking about clothes and hair and boys and other things that do not interest Lien at all. When Ali writes in the poesie album she gives Lien a grown-up future very different from her childish games:
Dear Lientje,
I wish you:
A handsome young man of your own,
A stunning and beautiful home,
A mountain of money,
Each morning all sunny,
With cows in the field and a horse in the stable,
A pig in the salt and a ham on the table,
All this and no fears,
For one hundred years.
To remind you of your cousin, Ali
Ali’s handwriting, like everything else about her, is neat, regular, and grown-up.
It is odd to have Ali writing about this world of cows, horses, and stables, which is not at all like the world of terraced houses and factory workers in which they live. Lien does see a lot of farms, though, outside Dordrecht, on expeditions looking for wildlife with Kees or on trips to see Granny and Grandpa in Strijen, twenty minutes on the bus from where they live. Granny and Grandpa Strien (which is what everyone calls Strijen) have a three-room rented cottage in a village where there is no electricity, so at night you use an oil lamp, although mostly you have to go to bed as soon as it gets dark.
Lien often visits Strien with Kees and Ali on weekends. Riding together on the bus bumping along the ridge of the dike they feel like royalty, looking out at the huge flatness of fields on all sides. At Granny and Grandpa’s you get to sleep high up on a platform under the sloping roof after climbing a ladder. From there you can peek down over the ledge at the room below you, but almost at once the kerosene lamp is turned off—the flame dying with a soft pop—and it is impossible to see anything at all. Lien has never beheld such darkness or such silence. When she stares into it, shapes float in front of her and there is a ringing sound in her ears.
In the morning she helps to feed the pig (who will soon be “in salt” in the larder), the rabbits, and the chickens. These all live in pens on the little strip of land that surrounds the cottage, where your shoes sink deep into the cold clay. The mouths of the rabbits are like the clay in their chilly softness as they snuffle the clumps of grass from Lien’s palm. Built right against the dike, which rears up like a mountain behind it, the cottage looks out onto the dark water of a canal and beyond this onto a sea of fields, stretching until they vanish in the morning mist.
At breakfast Lien is squeezed between Kees and Ali. Granny—who speaks a countryside Dutch that Lien finds hard to follow—holds a loaf tight against her aproned stomach and butters the end. “Who would like a stick?” she asks. Kees is quickest to raise his hand, so Granny cuts swiftly toward herself into the loaf and uses the knife to flick a chunk of bread in his direction, making it land right in front of him on the scrubbed wooden table, right-side up. “Who would like a stick?” Granny repeats.
In Strien the children roam free around the cottages, the edges of the fields,
and on top of the dikes that look out across the river. There are aunts and uncles in the other cottages that are pressed in between the dike and fields and sometimes they eat there. The aunts are kindly and do not mind if you join them. Just like at Granny and Grandpa’s there are long prayers before mealtimes, but with other children around you must not close your eyes too long during the praying because someone will take the nice bits of food from your plate. The farmworkers just accept Lien as part of the crowd of children. If anyone asks, she is “one of Pot’s,” because Grandpa’s nickname is Pot.
* * *
—
STRIJEN IS MUD COUNTRY, perfectly flat. The Netherlands are really a vast estuary formed from Alpine rock that has been ground down over millions of years and carried here by the Rhine. As the land flattens, the great river loses power and in the east it drops smooth, rounded gravel. When it slows still farther to the country’s center it deposits sand. Finally, the river becomes tidal and even slower, leaving the silt that forms the clays of the southwest. It is this riverland that has been turned into polders, with the Rhine (now split into separate broad channels that have their own names as rivers) kept back behind dikes and flowing high above the land.
Auntie is a child of this perfectly level mud country, with its unbounded skies spread far below river and sea. Her father and her brothers are itinerant farmworkers, earning just enough by moving from farm to farm as unskilled labor: sowing, weeding, harvesting, hauling the potatoes and sugar beet onto horse-drawn wagons so they can be carried to town. When there is no farmwork to be had the men leave home to labor on the barges out in the mudflats, where they gather reeds for roofing and the manufacture of baskets. These polder laborers, with hands like cracked leather, are the lowest order of Dutch society—they own almost nothing, as if ground down like the rock from the Alps, from boulders, to gravel, to sand, to mud.
Auntie has left this clay country and come to the city, first as a maid in service and now as the wife of an engine fitter, with his two children to care for, and Lien, as well as a child of her own. She has turned against the religion of her parents—their prayers and their Bible reading, their belief that thunder is the anger of God—and replaced it with a faith in socialism: the faith that men and women can be made better through collective effort; that a new world can be built through education, health care, and public building, things held in common by all. The German invasion is a setback, but she and her husband are prepared for a fight.
* * *
—
LIEN IS NOW PART OF THE RHYTHM of her new family. She does not think about the war or politics, except in the vaguest sense as something that governs the movements of an impossibly distant adult world. She does, of course, miss Mamma and Pappa. The intense hurt of those weeks following her birthday has abated, but there is still that deep sense of longing, the wish that seizes her when she least expects it, just wanting Mamma to be there. As the days darken, Lien begins to think of the second of the dates that were in her mind when she arrived in Dordrecht: Mamma’s birthday on October 28. She has money to spend on a present and a letter to write. Because they cannot use the public postal service, Lien has to start in good time, so Auntie tells her to sit down at the kitchen table one rainy Thursday afternoon after school. It is funny to write as if a date that is still nearly a month in the future is already there:
1 October ’42
Darling Mammie,
Hooray, the happy day we’ve been looking forward to has finally arrived.
I am going to school now. In September I started going to school. I am sending you a little present. Next year a bigger present. And now we must do some singing, till your throat is sore.
Lien writes out all the words of the Dutch birthday song, so that her letter already gets to two thirds of the way down the first side of the big sheet of lined paper: “Long may she live, long may she live, long may she live in gloooory. In gloooory . . .” There is now more song on the page than there is news. Finally, the song runs out. “So,” writes Lien, as if she is herself breathless from the singing, “now you must have a sore throat?” Writing to Mamma is not nearly as nice as going to see her would be, and it is difficult to know what to say. A good part of the letter is now completed, but there is still a side and a quarter of empty lined paper to be filled with some kind of news.
At first it was a bit strange and new at school. I had to get used to it. After a bit it got better. Luckily I am not behind with my studies. We are already doing fractions. I am not very good at them, but it is still going quite well. There is a boy here who is also not a Jew anymore. And you are not a Jew anymore. And it is nearly a quarter of an hour’s walk to school. I have a master now, not a lady teacher. He is called Mr. Heimenberg and he is a great joker. First he colored a girl’s cheeks red with red chalk from the blackboard . . .
“And you are not a Jew anymore. And it is nearly a quarter of an hour’s walk to school.” How did she go from the one to the other? Lien does not think about it; her pen just keeps moving along the paper as she thinks half about Mamma and half about whether it will soon be dry enough for playing outside. She also starts thinking about Mr. Heimenberg, the teacher. Caught up in the excitement, she gets confused and starts repeating her words:
And then he also chalks her nose red. And then also a girl or a boy in Maths has has to point out something and then he turns like this with the stick and they cannot get it. Finally he gives it to them and someone or other has to point it out.
Quite what this story is about remains unclear, no matter how many times you read it, but Lien’s writing continues unperturbed:
For the rest, the children at school and on the street are quite kind. And the little girl, Mariannetje, nearly two years old, she is a mischievous darling. First she had to go on the potty. She calls it her “po.” So I went to get the potty. Then Auntie said, “So Mariannetje, come over here and then you can go on your potty.” But then she said “No, no popo—fibbering.” What she meant was that she didn’t need the potty, she had told a fib.
Now Lien is nearly at the bottom of the sheet of paper, so that the last bit of her final sentence has to be squeezed into unlined space:
I hope you have a lovely day, and we here will also celebrate a little bit. I will buy flowers and some nice food. I hope that next year we will be together again. Many kisses from Lientje, who misses you very much.
Will she really buy flowers and nice food for her mother’s birthday? It feels like the correct and grown-up thing to say, just like the present she is sending feels correct and grown-up: a little tile that has a cartoon on it, drawn in what looks like felt pen.
It shows a man who is supposed to be drowning, although, to be honest, his chest is very dry looking in its smart jacket, and his body sticks out high above the waterline. The shore is right beside him, frustratingly out of reach, but luckily a life buoy is flying through the sky on its way toward him. “When danger is at its height, rescue is close at hand” is written beneath. Standing in the shop with Auntie, she felt it was a fitting present, and also it is not possible to send things that are bulky when using the secret post. Auntie praises Lien for finishing her letter and packs it and the tile into an envelope, adding a little note of her own:
Dear Lien’s Mother,
I want just to add a few words to Lientje’s letter. It did take her a bit of effort to get it full this time, but she succeeded in the end!
She is still doing very well—she goes to school and I get very good reports on how she is doing. She is well behaved and quick on the uptake. She is always cheerful, but now and then she does miss you and her father very badly.
Lientje chose the present herself. She would have preferred the motto “He who laughs last, laughs best,” but they didn’t have that one in the shop.
As far as clothes are concerned, I am organizing things as seems best to me. Everything that gets too small for our Ali fits her perfectly. She h
as clothes enough, but there are a few things she has grown out of. But anyway, it is all working fine.
I often say to her that she is a half boy and then she replies, “That’s what mother always said.”
I hope that your day is not too sad, if that is possible, and that next year we can congratulate you in person, together with your husband and your child.
We shall make it a bit festive here and Lien will certainly think of you the whole day.
If it is possible, do send us a letter and write to say if there is anything special you would like us to do for Lien.
All best wishes, also from Lientje’s Uncle Henk.
Her Auntie, Jans
It is not easy to write this message or to get the girl to write to her far-off mother and it is harder still when the envelope comes back unopened and has to be hidden from Lien’s sight.
Meanwhile, Auntie continues with the washing, the cleaning, the cooking, and the bringing up of children, trying as best she can. Lien’s dresses (the Bonneterie gray silk and the clock dress of satin made by her mother) need to be passed down the line to other children, they cannot be kept as mementos, even if they feel to Lien at that instant like treasures lost.