The Cut Out Girl
Page 9
Nine
A succession of rooms, visited only briefly, sometimes for a night, sometimes for a week. They blur into one another, present only in fleeting memories, such as that of an afternoon spent staring upward at the sunshine framing the edges of a blackout blind. Lien makes no decisions, loses self-awareness for hours, but she is not afraid. Everywhere there are new routines to follow: where to wash, when and what to eat, how to eat, where to sleep. On the first night away from the Van Es family she stays with Mrs. de Bruyne’s daughter, just a few streets away from the Bilderdijkstraat. When she gets to the camp bed in the upstairs bedroom there is a bag containing her clothes and a few belongings, but no word of what has happened or what is planned. Lien asks no questions. She eats when she is supposed to eat and sleeps when she is told it is bedtime. For the rest, time drifts past without her really noticing it; the people—whether kind and gentle, nervous, or resentful—meld into one.
Lien no longer goes to school and hardly ever sees other children. At first she misses Auntie, Kees, Ali, and Marianne and cries when she thinks of them, but quite soon they—like everything else—lose focus in her memory. They are shapes at the edge of her field of vision toward which she will not turn her gaze. Mrs. Heroma, though, is still a presence. She is spoken of in whispers as a great personage by adults and sometimes she even comes to a front room to collect Lien and take her onward to a new house.
At one point Mrs. Heroma takes Lien to her own home, where she lives with her husband the doctor. It is bigger than the other houses she has been in, even though she sees it only very briefly from the outside—pressed, as she was the first time they met, into the folds of Mrs. Heroma’s coat. Lien stays in an empty room above the surgery, from where she hears the patients coming and going, the moms chatting on the pavement over the tops of their prams.
Dr. Heroma is always busy. She hears his bass voice, but not the words he speaks, sounding out, muffled, through the floorboards every ten minutes as he opens the door to his consulting room and calls the next patient inside. Occasionally she hears the rattle of his keys as he closes the front door of the surgery, followed by his quick steps and the clunk of a car door. The engine trying to start sounds like a kind of laughter that won’t get going: He, he, he, he—he. He, he, he, he—he. Then, at the third attempt, it nearly catches, and on the fourth it does, almost straightaway turning to a weak and then a strong pitter-patter, pitter-patter, pitter-patter. For a short while it stays there while the engine establishes its rhythm, then the pitch of the pitter-patter goes higher and moves off down the street and fades away.
Mrs. Heroma is more strict during the time that Lien is staying with her. Lien has to be absolutely still on the sofa upstairs. Elsewhere in the house there are other people, but she never sees them. On the drying rack that stands in the room in front of her there is laundry, women’s clothing, which does not belong to Mrs. Heroma. Sometimes in the night there is movement. The front door opens and then shuts with a tiny click that echoes in the silence. In the darkness Lien often lies awake with nothing but blackness in front of her eyes.
She keeps on being moved from one house to another. Whenever Lien feels sleep press in upon her, at night or on some empty afternoon while gazing at floorboards, she fills her mind with pictures and flies high over the buildings to the places where she used to play. She is Goeie Lientje (Good Lien) when she can do this flying and carries out little miracles in a world of familiar faces where the rules are not the same. She rescues animals and people and explains things to everyone without having to think at all about what to say. All the time there is that flying feeling, a kind of swimming through the air that she feels even when her feet are on the ground. Strange waves make her feel unsteady but she knows that all will be well.
There is also a Kwaaie Lientje (Bad Lien or Angry Lien) who cannot fly and who seems to wade slowly through an invisible tar. Sometimes Kwaaie Lientje does not move forward at all and just drifts backward on the stream of stickiness, however hard she tries. Kwaaie Lientje goes with Hansje to the animal graveyard they have made together. There they take the creatures that are dead or dying and carry them to graves so deep down in the earth that the bottom cannot be seen. As for the animals that are still living, Kwaaie Lientje helps them on their way, feeling the crack of their little bones as she holds them in her grip. Goeie Lientje or Kwaaie Lientje, she feels herself shifting from one to the other—from good to bad or angry—as she stares into the blankness while empty hours go by.
* * *
—
AT LAST, the people who determine these things make a decision: Lien must go away from Dordt. So here she stands, dressed and ready, in another upstairs bedroom, waiting for another person to collect her and take her to a new place. The bell rings, but Lien knows not to answer and waits patiently behind the closed door. There are feet on the stairs and then suddenly a voice that is familiar, loud even when she is trying to whisper. It is Auntie. Lien does not rush out to embrace her but instead remains timidly where she is standing, one leg curled behind the other, waiting to be hugged. A familiar smell envelops her, the soft heaviness of arms pressing downward, and a floating sensation, her feet dangling as she is pulled upward to Auntie’s ruddy cheek. It is the first time that somebody has touched her in many weeks.
But there is no time for greetings, and anyway, this is not a reunion. Auntie will take her on the back of her bike to a new place where she will be safe. A few words are spoken that do not really register, about everyone being well back at home in the Bilderdijkstraat, and moments later Lien is sitting sidesaddle on the baggage rack of Auntie’s bicycle, looking out in the early morning on the familiar streets of Dordt. It is a Saturday, she thinks, or at least there are no schoolchildren, just a few men who walk with their heads down, stepping quickly on their way to work. At first it looks as if Auntie is heading to Granny and Grandpa’s in Strien, because once they are out of the city there are the same dark, flat, empty fields decked with mist. But riding up on the silent dike road, high above the land, they take the opposite direction, heading southwest.
After a while they ride beside the gray expanse of the Oude Maas River. A few barges that sit upon it struggle against the stream toward Dordrecht, creating small white waves around their bows and a yellowish wash behind. The barges are so heavily laden that their decks stand just a foot or so above the water but they ride above the level of the land. Lien sits passively looking outward while Auntie pedals without varying her pace. Auntie’s legs move rhythmically upward and downward, upward and downward, just like the steam train that took Lien away from her home in The Hague. Spring sunshine clears the fog from the fields that stretch below to one side of them. The birds are singing. They pass through villages with tall redbrick houses where there are mothers queuing for bakeries and children playing in the street. Auntie cycles onward. In her mind’s eye Lien magically begins to fly above the scene.
The journey is broken up when they cross the river on a ferry boat—a proper one like you get in books, with a funnel belching coal smoke that you can taste on your tongue, a deck with ventilation ports, and a real captain in a uniform on the bridge. It is almost like crossing an ocean, feeling the engine thump away below you as you run from one side of the boat to the other and then stand at the bow like a lookout watching the approaching shore. There are two other children on the boat: a bigger girl of ten and her brother, aged eight. Lien fits right in between them and soon they are Nile explorers, watching out for attackers, weapons at the ready. Here, out on the river, the breeze is stronger—blowing hair around your face and into your mouth. After weeks of solitary existence, in the sunshine Lien suddenly comes alive.
But now the sound from the engine changes and all too soon there is a squeak of wood against metal as the ferry bumps against a jetty and the mooring ropes are thrown. Almost at once the gates open and they cycle on, plunged again into the emptiness of the flatland, which is disturbed only by the regular crisscross of
ditches and dikes. After the momentary animation of being with the other children, Lien drifts back to her dreamworld, hardly registering where they go. The day is warm, almost summery, and as time passes the air that surrounds them becomes heavy with the fragrant damp that rises from the earth. To Lien, who is sitting so uncomfortably with her legs dangling, it feels like a long journey, but it is still morning when Auntie finally stops.
Ten
When Lien and Auntie step from the bicycle they are on top of a high dike facing an even broader stretch of water than the one they crossed by ferry. This is the Nieuwe Maas, on the other side of which, a few miles downstream, lies Rotterdam. Lien has no idea where she is or where she is going, but this is the place where—according to the story that they told everyone in Dordrecht—her parents are supposed to have died. Three years ago, in 1940, German bombers smashed the heart of the old city, leveling twenty-five thousand homes in a single raid. The destruction and the threat that the same would happen to Utrecht if there was no surrender broke the Dutch war effort. Without an air force there was nothing that could be done.
When Rotterdam was engulfed by a firestorm on May 14, 1940, the war meant almost nothing to Lien, who was only six, and even now, she has never seen bombing, or shooting, or even anger from a uniformed man. A square mile of rubble that was once the center of a Renaissance city lies just beyond the horizon. Yet from where Lien stands on the great river she sees only sunshine and newly cut grass.
In Rotterdam, though, in the spring of 1943, resistance is growing. This is the industrial base of the Netherlands, a place of union power, where the now-banned Social Democratic Workers’ Party (of which the Heromas and the Van Esses are members) has deep roots. Across the river from the city is a landscape of farms, outhouses, and small villages where it is easier for the resistance to hide. This, therefore, is the logical place to take a Jewish child now that the situation in Dordrecht has become too dangerous for her to remain.
Lien does not remember the moment of arrival in IJsselmonde. Following her departure from the Van Esses and the period of lonely isolation at short-stay addresses in Dordrecht, she has struggled more and more to engage with the outside world.
Once again Lien is passed from one adult to another, without a real explanation or a proper good-bye. It was the same when she was collected from the Pletterijstraat by Mrs. Heroma just eight months ago. The Lien who is handed over this time, however, is a different creature: no list of funny street names could catch her attention now. You will not see her crying because she misses her parents or the Van Esses, or reaching out to befriend a fresh set of children as she arrives at her new home. A curtain of self-protection has descended. Lien thinks little about the past or the future, and even the present is reduced to just a small number of necessary things. When she later looks back at IJsselmonde, she will see it only in black and white. Almost all that registers in her memory is the cold stone floor and the lack of natural light.
* * *
—
THE COTTAGE WHERE SHE STAYS is a single-story whitewashed building, rather like a barn, that is half smothered by the dike. There are ten people in this small building: a couple with six children, then Lien and another hideaway, Jo. The parents are teachers and, like Auntie and Uncle van Es, members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Mieneke, the mother, tells her children to make room for Lien at the kitchen table and afterward shows her where she can sleep. There is a back room for the girls and the grown-up daughters. It is so full of bedding that you can barely see the floor. Lien should be able to squeeze in on the right, up against the wall, Mieneke tells her, then checks in Lien’s bag that she has enough clothes to wear and points out where the chamber pot is kept.
Once Lien is hidden inside the dike cottage, unable to return to the daylight, the heat within her turns cold and she barely speaks. The family—who are lively, friendly, and interested in her welfare—comes into the house with flushed cheeks as if from a different world. Lien hardly sees them. She moves from the bedroom to the kitchen, doing a bit of cleaning, peeling potatoes, and washing dishes. She is unused to housework, and the knife sits awkwardly in her hand as she cuts a still-muddy potato, revealing a thick, clean slab of yellow beneath. She has to tell her fingers, as if they are somebody else’s, to cut more gently so as not to waste the food. Mieneke gives her direction, standing behind her and guiding Lien with her hands.
Mieneke is there in the kitchen at mealtimes but she often goes out straight after. It is only to Jo, with whom she is left in the house once the others have gone, that Lien ever feels close. Jo talks and she listens. He is eighteen and has escaped from a camp in Germany, but he is not Jewish. They are not taking only Jews now, he tells her; all men who are not in essential professions are being forced to go to work in Germany. If you are under thirty-five you can’t get food stamps without a right-to-stay permit and if you’re caught without one they’ll send you to an Arbeitslager, which is worse than prison. There’s no way Jo’s going to work again for the Moffen, as he calls them, and, if things somehow work themselves out, he’ll find a way to fight.
With his big frame Jo is like a giant cooped up here under the rafters, looking almost straight across at the four small, square, strangely familiar windows below the roofline that let in a little light. Jo has a sense of the outside that doesn’t need a window to see it. He laughs with the family, asks what they have been doing, has views on farming, teases the girls, and remembers their names.
Weeks turn into months in IJsselmonde—light shines more brightly through the square windows, and then as July turns first to August and then to September, it gradually fades. Lien loses track of time amid the sameness of the days. The house, which never got warm even in the height of summer, grows ever colder with the stove left unlit. There are itchy spots on her legs. She hardly noticed that she was scratching them at first, but as time passes more and more hard purple lumps appear that bleed when they are broken open, leaving gashes of black scab. She wants to hide them but they call out with a thumping rhythm. They burn hot and sharp if she pulls her socks up over them, so she walks shivering with her bare feet swollen purple, feeling the eyes of the other girls as she steps.
At night Lien sleeps in the crowded room with the others, women and girls turning their weight in the darkness, thickening the air with their breath. She wraps herself tight under her cover, surrounded by the sense of the other bodies. Her legs, with their heat in the midst of the coldness, keep her awake. In the morning she stands up when the room stirs around her. It is hardly any brighter than it was during the night. Inside, she feels a numbness, keeping everything at a distance, not once having a sense of fear.
* * *
—
THEN, ONE EVENING in the late months of 1943, another moment of crisis arrives, another knock at the door. Lien is doing the washing-up in the kitchen, but she is told to go and hide. From the bedroom moments later, Lien hears excited talking, and then Mieneke comes in telling Jo and her they must run because the police are on their way.
It is odd how shoes matter at these moments. When the men came to the Bilderdijkstraat she had to go out in the big boots that stood by the doorway, but now her feet are so swollen that nothing will fit.
Lien feels almost calm, but a charge runs through the rest of the household, and before she knows it the freezing night air and the darkness is upon her and she is being jogged roughly on Jo’s shoulder, one of his arms wrapped across her sore legs. He knows where he is going and edges along the sides of barns and outbuildings in a crouching run. Then there is a thump to the ground and a feeling of wetness and the scratching of thorns around them as they lie hidden, Jo’s chest quietly heaving against her, in a ditch.
There are invisible voices around them and they hear the barking of dogs. Not very far away there are lights on the road. The lights and voices grow stronger, come to a stop very near them, and then begin slightly to fade. Without warning,
Jo grips her legs tightly again and pushes them forward through the brambles at half pace. Though it ought to be hurting she feels nothing but elation as she digs her fingers into the material of his coat. Jo jerks his head from left to right and then breaks into a second run, this time up the slope of the dike. His feet slip beneath them but he carries on scrabbling with a ferocious energy until they are for a moment high up on the road where the wind hits them and where she sees the glimmer of the great river below them in the dark. Then down again, sliding as the grass turns to mud at the weight of them. On the slope, they lie still, with their faces against the wet. For an instant, Lien is reminded of the bank she used to climb down to fetch tadpoles with Kees back in Dordrecht and of her feeling of dread for the murky water below.
“It’s going well,” whispers Jo encouragingly. After resting a moment he tells her to climb onto his back. Like this they move as fast as possible along the steep, slippery surface. It is curfew time, so the occasional sound of movement on the path above them must come from the police. As Jo runs he has to loosen Lien’s fingers, which she has gripped hard to his throat in her eagerness to hold on. After a bit, Jo turns to her in a whisper: they are getting near the village now and they’ll need to go back over the dike and then in among the houses. They will have to be deadly quiet.
Now that her eyes have adjusted she can see more by the moonlight, though right at this moment it’s just Jo’s broad and thinly bearded face that she can pick out in the darkness. That and the angle of the slope. She trusts Jo utterly. He is always kind.
On reaching the edge of the village they move farther up to the top of the dike, with Jo again frantically glancing from left to right. All is clear and he darts up over the road with her, holding tight to her legs so that she notices again how much they hurt. But then, in the excitement, she feels nothing apart from a strange wakeful, happy alertness that makes her see and hear everything more sharply than before. She registers the scrapes and bumps as they move between the buildings: the skin that is grazed off her knee against a wall; a twig that comes out of nowhere and strikes her in the eye. These injuries, though, come with no pain attached. They feel like they are happening to somebody else.