The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  I remind Lien of the way that she entertained my aunt, little Marianne, in the Van Es family and her eyes light up.

  “Yes, that’s true,” she says and then, in an instant, the balance of the conversation changes, the stiffness is gone, and Lien begins to tell me about Sunday, September 17, 1944.

  Fifteen

  Lien stands on a road at the edge of a wheat field and watches them: half circles, some in bright colors—blue, red, yellow, green—drifting down.

  Parachutes, right here in the sunlight now that there is a break in the clouds!

  There are children around her pointing. These are the English soldiers landing. She scans the uncountable silhouettes. And above them are planes in their hundreds that move as if they are locked together, sliding like a stencil across the sky.

  It makes her laugh to see them, like the way you laugh at an accident when you know it is serious but you cannot make a serious face. It is silly how many there are. Thousands and thousands. It cannot be real.

  Her neck hurts with watching. She follows one parachute from the moment it hatches. First comes a little mushroom of cloth and then the strings and then a lump that is really a man. They tumble downward, the lump going first and the mushroom racing after, getting bigger as it goes. It fills up and then opens and slows right down. You can’t see them landing. They just vanish in the distance behind the trees. When one is gone she looks up for another to follow. They pour from the backs of the planes, one after another, like dominoes on a run.

  Sometimes it is not soldiers but packages that hang from the guy ropes. Adults who join the group tell her about the difference: some carry jeeps and some carry cannons. And then later there are planes that are towed by others. These are gliders that cannot fly by themselves. She watches as the rope is cut and the pulling plane moves away from the towed one, which noses downward so quickly that it looks like a crash.

  These really are the English! Everyone keeps saying the same thing!

  So many keep coming that it ought to be boring except that the excitement around her grows bigger all the time. A tall man explains things to a boy who hops up and down beside him, repeating strange words like “Allies,” “Dakotas,” and “Flak.” She watches out for the colors—blue, red, yellow, green.

  Then suddenly there is a thump behind them and the crowd turns to see fire spread in the sky and then, after this, a worm of black smoke that boils up from the ground. It is all at a distance, so it feels pretend.

  After a while a group of men races past on bicycles without tires, the metal rims cutting into the sand. They are wearing orange banners and, around her, people begin a wild rendition of the song “Long Live the Queen.”

  In the distance there are rattles and rhythmic bangs.

  Then, right above them, frozen it seems for a moment, there are two planes so close that she can see the rivets on their gray-striped bellies as well as their hanging bombs. The propellers are just shiny circles of air. In a few seconds the planes have vanished but noise from their engines sings on for a very long time.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME THAT SHE GETS HOME to Algemeer there is a siren wailing, filling the street with long, low, pitiful howls. As soon as she opens the front door she hears the voice of Mother van Laar calling, asking who it is, which is not what usually happens. When she answers, Lien is ordered to come straight into the cellar, where the whole family is squeezed in. Mother van Laar, her face all glossy, says with a frantic edge that two children have been killed on the Diedenweg, hit by a bomb. Father van Laar sits on a crate beside her, his hair standing sideways in a tuft. “The English are coming,” says Jaap, as if this is news to Lien. Then, after a minute, the electricity cuts out.

  * * *

  —

  THREE MILES AWAY, on the large, flat expanse of heather and grass that is the Ginkelse Heide, British paratroopers are moving toward Arnhem. They are part of Operation Market Garden, the plan to defeat Germany by cutting straight through Holland to the industrial heartland of the Ruhr. Altogether there are ten thousand of them and they need to move quickly across enemy territory to capture and then hold the final bridge of a sequence, which stretches, eight miles in the distance, across the Rhine.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING it is clear that school has been canceled because there are children playing in the street. Freed by an odd kind of holiday spirit, Lien goes out to join them and finds that boys are collecting trophies. One has a whole collection spread out before him on the grass. Lien edges in to join the group that has fanned out around him and hears that the various bits of green canvas with straps and buckles are parachute cords. The boy also has cartridge cases: small, shiny, copper-colored tubes. She is allowed to hold one and stares into the blackness of the inside. “Smell the top of it,” he instructs her, and without thinking about it, she takes a deep lungful of sulfurous air. She coughs and her eyes sparkle, a response that he clearly enjoys. The boy has chosen her now for special attention and he hands her, with reverence, the painted fin of a British bomb. Their fingers touch as she takes it with a shy smile.

  There is a romance to those early days after the landings. Often there is rapid fire in the distance or even the whistle of a bullet nearby. The trophy collections of the boys in the street get bigger and girls are to be seen in colorful nylon dresses that have been made by their mothers out of parachute cloth. Lien would like one herself.

  After a while, though, the announcement comes that school is restarting and the mood around her alters. The weather, which had been bright momentarily, turns to fog and then rain. War still continues in the sky above them and on the ground beyond the horizon, with low-flying planes, the rumble of artillery, and the occasional smell of oily smoke in the air. Sometimes there is news of a bomb that has hit a house. Within the bounds of the village itself, however, everything seems almost as it was.

  Then Bennekom gradually fills with people: first a few families with stacks of luggage, who settle into houses and barns in the neighborhood, but after this, hundreds at a time, refugees who stop for only a few hours before they move on. One morning on the way to school she sees a long, motley procession of bewildered faces, exhausted people standing still in the road so that no one can pass. There are walkers, horse-drawn wagons, and bicyclists, all awkwardly loaded, waiting to head out of the village. The wagons have white flags at their corners that hang down, heavy, against the rakes and broom handles that make do for poles. In front of her an old gentleman has a built-up wheelbarrow with planks sticking out of it on which a lot of packing cases have been hammered in place. Beside him stands a girl who is pushing a bicycle. Lien turns to see what is hanging from the handlebars and is shocked to find that they are rabbits, a whole set of them, dead, tied there with string by their legs. Above, feeling close, there is a constant drone of Allied bombers, but you cannot see them because of the clouds.

  That afternoon, when Lien gets home to Algemeer, she is told that she must pack her things.

  * * *

  —

  BETWEEN SEPTEMBER 17 and October 20, 1944, the fate of the village of Bennekom hung in the balance. The landings nearby on the Ginkelse Heide were at the utmost edge of Operation Market Garden and British paratroopers had come down there, more than sixty miles into enemy territory, expecting reinforcement from Allied tanks that were intended to race to their rescue across six bridges connected by a single road. Those bridges all needed to be captured by separate landings of airborne forces. It was the seizure of these bridges and the rapid movement of tanks along the road between them that would create a narrow corridor from the old front line to the German frontier.

  Day one had been fairly successful. In spite of heavy resistance, a small detachment had sped westward to Arnhem and had secured the northern end of the sixth and final bridge of the sequence, from which Germany could be reached. But enormous prob
lems were already apparent: their jeeps had failed to land safely, bad weather had delayed Polish reinforcements, and Allied radios did not work. The worst, however, was still to come.

  Frederick Browning, the Airborne Corps’ overall commander, could have spotted the two SS Panzer divisions that defended Arnhem, but in the rush to get the operation going, signs of their presence had been ignored. These were full, battle-hardened, armored combat divisions with thousands of soldiers. They had tanks, long-range guns, and far more ammunition than the lightly armed paratroopers. Even so, the small British detachment held out for nine days. In the end, however, on September 25, with no prospect of relief from the Allied ground army (whose crossings were delayed at Son and at Nijmegen) they were forced to concede defeat. By that point, fifteen hundred paratroopers lay dead in and around Arnhem and over six thousand more had been captured, many with very serious wounds. Their struggle would be remembered as “a bridge too far.”

  For the bulk of September, Bennekom lay outside the immediate zone of conflict, and as the situation worsened, it took in refugees from neighboring towns. In the wake of the eventual liberation of Nijmegen, however, the front lines shifted and Allied forces were now less than five miles away from the village. Allied artillery strikes were hitting the edges of Bennekom, as were German V-1s when these misfired. By mid-October, SS units were moving through the streets requisitioning houses, and on the twentieth the German authorities ordered the inhabitants to evacuate, at the latest by midday on the twenty-second. Bennekom was becoming a military zone. Lien, who had once lain hidden in a rural backwater, now stood at a pivot for the entire war.

  * * *

  —

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, October 22, at 33 Algemeer there is tense order. An old pram blocks the hallway, its shape barely visible under a covering blanket that has been tied on with rope. In the kitchen, Mother van Laar is filling a suitcase with jars of food. Upstairs, the house has a strange echo and is lighter than usual because the curtains have been taken down. Lien’s little package of things is added to the jumble of objects on the landing, which Father van Laar ties up in another blanket and then carries to the front room. Lien is told to sit beside it with Jaap and so they wait there in silence, staring at the empty shelves while thuds and scrapes echo through the half-empty rooms of the house.

  After what feels like a long time they head outside into a light drizzle, the sky bright in spite of the cloud cover. Lien is wearing three dresses so that they will not need to be carried and she can feel the fabric cutting into the skin on the underside of her arms. They shut the door but do not lock it because German soldiers will, it is likely, come to live here in a few hours.

  All along the street there are similar groups emerging from doorways, calling to one another, testing the weight of the bags they will carry. The men (there are not many) stand together for a moment, then movement begins and they all take their place in a kind of line. Suitcases are dropped, awkward objects are left on the roadway, but fairly quickly a rhythm is established and they make their way up the street that normally takes her to school. In the village center there are some wagons with white flags at their corners and here the line of people is split into smaller groups.

  For a while everything is familiar: the bakery, the greengrocer’s, the butcher’s shop. Then the village peters out into more widely spaced houses and finally they are in woodland and unknown fields. It is important to stay close to the wagons, because if they do not, there is a danger that they will be attacked by planes. So they clump together with a few dozen neighbors, who, like them, are mostly silent as they walk. Father van Laar keeps Jaap close beside him. Lien has her eyes fixed on the rubber wheels of the cart that leads the procession and watches as wet leaves are picked up by its tires. Sometimes the leaves stick on and are carried all the way over and sometimes they just drop.

  It is slow progress, with a lot of breaks. At one point they pass a dead horse on the roadside, its hooves pointing upward, the body covered with a shivering carpet of flies. It is interesting to look at and she stands there for a moment before the moving mass explodes into a buzz of flight.

  The walk is not hard, though Lien feels sticky under her layers of clothing. It is midafternoon by the time they approach their destination, the town of Ede, a place she has never been. The first thing that she sees, before they reach any buildings, is a bomb crater at the edge of the road. She and Jaap, allies for a moment, step away from the group to stare at it. The crater is an almost perfect circle, like a kitchen bowl cut into the sand, and Lien wonders what it would feel like to be down there inside it, looking up at the high, heaped sides.

  Among the first of the buildings, they see rubble, great hills of tangled metal, brick, and concrete thrown up alongside houses that look perfectly fine. On the one in front of them it is just a corner that is missing: the room up there is cut open, with a door, a bed, and half a ceiling surrounded by gray sky. A mess of wall and window lies beside them in the street.

  Now that they have reached the town their group is merging with others. The road ahead is blocked, people are saying, because the Germans are conducting a search. So they stand and wait in the gray afternoon light. At first people arch their necks to see what is happening, but as time passes they begin to stare in nervous agitation at the ground. Men in uniform are walking slowly along the line of families, stopping now and then to ask questions or to shout orders that no one fully understands. Ten steps ahead, a young man holds out a bundle of papers, but in spite of this, he is pulled all of a sudden by his collar to the side of the road. Father van Laar clutches a cardboard folder and mumbles to his wife. The soldiers’ helmets are close now. The helmets have small white shields on them with two lightning bolts side by side.

  And then the soldiers are right next to them and taking papers from Father van Laar, who keeps repeating, “I am essential labor,” which to Lien is just meaningless sound. Meanwhile, the young man who was pulled aside a moment earlier is being marched up the line of people by a soldier who is shouting and pointing a gun. Everywhere now, from all the soldiers, there is shouting. But although Lien’s heart beats quickly, she does not shiver and she continues to look around. The world that she sees is strange and distant, almost a kind of play. She feels that she could be flying now, like the Good Lientje of her dreams.

  * * *

  —

  IF LIEN COULD FLY above the road on which she is waiting with so many others then she would see Ede spread out below her, a fortress town. The trees have been felled to give clean lines of fire, and young men, like the boy who was pulled out of line ahead of her, are now digging trenches at the point of a gun. The town has been gouged by Allied air strikes, and everywhere, pointing upward, there are the long steel barrels of Flak antiaircraft guns. Strung along the roads that lead to Ede there are the bodies of forty resistance fighters, left as a warning, with signs that read TERRORIST pinned to their chests. And in the woods there are hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers: the might of the two SS Panzer divisions, with more arriving all the time.

  For the winter of 1944–45, which is known to the Dutch as the Hunger Winter, the front lines of Europe lay frozen. In the east the Russian army had entered Poland but stopped short of Warsaw. In the south the Allies faced the Apennine Mountains, impassable until March. And in the west a huge counterattack, the Battle of the Bulge, would leave the Americans entrenched in the snow-covered forests of the Ardennes. North of this, the Netherlands lies divided. In the wake of Operation Market Garden, British and Canadian tanks have moved up to the Waal and Rhine, freeing Middelburg, Breda, Nijmegen, and ’s-Hertogenbosch. But the big cities—Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Utrecht, and the shell of Arnhem—remain under German rule.

  * * *

  —

  IN AMSTERDAM IN JANUARY 2015 it is dark outside and it has begun to rain. Lien and I face each other across her table in the light of a single lamp. H
er memories are not as clear as I have made them. She remembers scraps—the landings, the sirens, crouching down in the cellar, the girls in their dresses of parachute cloth, the dead bodies of soldiers in the streets of Ede—but some of the rest I must patch together from other sources, such as history books and diaries, and the witness accounts that I will get from other people whom I have yet to meet. The gaps in Lien’s memory are getting bigger as her contact with others grew less. Of the journey to Ede, which is still so vividly recounted by hundreds of others (who tell, for example, of the bomb crater or the dead horse with flies on it), she can picture nothing at all.

  Lien gets up to fetch us something to eat. When she opens the fridge the light that it casts is harsh on her face amid all the darkness. I move around unprompted, at home here already, and switch on a few lamps. The silence that we share is now the silence of friendship, comfortable though also sad. It feels as though we too, like the Lien of wartime, have been on a journey. We stretch our aching limbs.

  Somehow the meal has the character of a roadside stop. Tomorrow I will visit Algemeer to see what the house is like and I will walk from there to the church. Lien nods. The Van Laars’ house is still vivid to her: a point of light, though not of happiness. We stand, the remains of our dinner spread out on the table.

  Outside, I rush to the car through the rainstorm and then sit for a moment, wiping my glasses, as the engine warms up. After a bit I reverse and pull out onto the highway while I listen to nothing but the engine, the swish of the wipers, and the rain on the windows and the roof. A little way into the journey, out on the empty flatlands, I stop for fuel. As I stand there filling the tank, I am struck by the petrol station’s unusual beauty: its clean lines of illuminated color against the dark of the night. Inside I browse the backlit fridges for a moment before paying with my card. Then I am on the road again, following the signs for Ede, the town where I was born.