Postcards from No Man's Land (The Dance Sequence)

by Chambers, Aidan

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dad never knew his father of course, because of Jacob dying before he was born. But you know all about that. Sarah told me Dad was conceived on Grandad’s last weekend leave just a few days before he was sent to the battle. And besides, Dad has never been happy about the way Sarah idolises Jacob—that’s what he calls it—and romanticises—his word again—their three years of marriage. He says it’s unhealthy. No relationship, he says, is ever as perfect as Sarah makes out hers was with Grandfather, no matter how much the two people are in love. I wouldn’t know. All I know is she never married again. She’s had quite a few men friends, but she always says none of them ever matched up to Jacob. I think she feels that somehow his death didn’t end their love but sealed it for ever. She’s very determined, is Sarah. Once she’s decided about something, that’s it, no changing her mind. Pigheaded, Dad says.

  ‘Not that Dad and Sarah have ever really got on. They’re chalk and cheese, Mum says. Leave them on their own in a room together and after five minutes the third world war starts. And Dad certainly has a hang-up about not having had a father. Whenever I used to complain about anything to do with him, he would always say, “You should be grateful you’ve got a father to complain about.” But that would only make me more annoyed. Once, it annoyed me so much, I shouted at him that he was the one who ought to be grateful, because I wished I didn’t have a father, and certainly not him. I was about eleven at the time. I think I meant it as a sort of angry joke, you know how it is when you’re having a family row. But that’s not how Dad took it. It was the only time all through my childhood when I thought he was going to hit me. He didn’t, he’s very antiviolence. But he was more upset than I’ve ever seen him. He rushed out of the room and disappeared in to his workshop—he’s a big do-it-yourself addict—and didn’t reappear for ages. Mum was furious with me. A mega telling-off ensued. Much to sister Penny’s satisfaction, I might add.

  ‘Dad and I got on all right while I was young, till I was about ten. And then I don’t know what happened. Well, a number of things actually. Dad finally accepted that I didn’t think football was a matter of major importance in life, and that I was never going to be a do-it-yourself fanatic either. I didn’t like the way he and Penny started behaving with each other, he really did become obsessed with her, and still is. Anyhow, we started having serious rows.

  ‘I know it must sound silly, but the turning point was one day when I was about thirteen and I suddenly realised I didn’t think Dad’s jokes were funny any more. And that was it. After that he was just this man who happened to be my father and was mostly an embarrassment, a sort of relic from the nineteen sixties. With his long straggly hair thinning on top. And his stupid granny glasses. And a permanent appearance round the eyes of having just got up after not having gone to bed. Then there’s his roly-poly midriff hanging over his factory-distressed jeans that show off his slumpy bum. He looks like John Lennon gone to seed. John Lennon—who else!—being his personal idol and the music of the Beatles the height of his musical taste. Sarah always says he was badly infected by what she calls the sponge-brain flower-power toxins wafting over the Atlantic from America in the late sixties when Dad was in his twenties. By the way, he and Mum met at a Rolling Stones so-called concert. Pardon me while I chunder.’

  Jacob paused, aware that he’d allowed himself to be carried away, the telling taking over the story. Had he overdone it? Geertrui’s eyes were closed but he knew she was listening, and an amused smile encouraged him to continue.

  ‘Anyway, that’s how it was when I was fourteen and Mum had to go in to hospital for a big operation, which was followed by weeks of convalescence. Father and Penny could manage the house between them, and because Harry was, well, Harry, he was all right. But not me. I was a problem. The first week Mum was away the rows between Dad and Penny and me got really bad. So Sarah suggested I go and live with her till Mum was home and well again. To ease the strain on us all, she said. And for once Dad agreed with her.

  ‘Sarah’s house is a cottage in a village about four miles from my parents’, so I can easily cycle home if I need to but at the same time I’m far enough away for us all to be out of each other’s hair. And, as I told you, Sarah and I get on really well. We like the same things—music, reading, going to the theatre and stuff like that. And we both like to be on our own quite a bit of the time.

  ‘Eventually Mum got well again. It took about four months. But by then I was so happy at Sarah’s I didn’t want to go back. Which pleased everybody, I need hardly tell you. Except Mum. I haven’t said, have I, that I love Mum a lot. She hasn’t got stuck in the sixties the way Dad has, and she hasn’t gone to seed either. Not that she tries to behave like someone young, I don’t mean that. I suppose I mean she’s kept up with her proper age but stayed young inside. Actually, Mum is the one Harry gets his good looks from. And he’s very like Mum in his ways, which must be why I get along so well with him. I know Harry is her love child, as Sarah puts it, but I don’t mind because I also know Mum and I are friends. Which I’ve come to think is the best thing anyone can say about a parent. I’ve always been able to tell her anything and talk anything over with her. So Mum and I talked it over and we decided I should stay on at Sarah’s but that I was always welcome to go back if I want to to what I don’t any longer think of as home.

  ‘Which is how I came to live with my grandmother.’

  *

  Hospital noises filtered in from the corridor.

  Geertrui’s eyes opened.

  For the first time her head moved.

  They looked at each other, eye-to-eye.

  At last Geertrui said, ‘And have you forgiven him?’

  ‘Forgiven who?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘Forgiven him? What for?’

  ‘For being your father.’

  The question tripped him. ‘Do I …? Have I …?’

  Geertrui waited a moment before asking, ‘Are you glad you are alive?’

  Jacob took a deep breath. His heart rate increased and he felt himself blush. For a fading moth this lady had the attack of a Rottweiler.

  He managed to say, ‘Yes. Well, mostly. Sometimes not. I get depressed now and then and wish … Sarah calls them my mouse moods and says I’ll probably grow out of them.’

  Geertrui gave a short dry chuckle that sounded like walking over gravel.

  ‘Blame biology,’ she said.

  He wasn’t sure whether or not she was being ironic. But he was glad of a chance to smile and say, ‘Yes!’

  Geertrui’s head turned away and her eyes closed again.

  After a silence she said, ‘Daan has explained you what is to happen to me?’

  He could only nod, even though she wasn’t looking.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  Another deep breath before he could reply, ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do you approve?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘No.’ Geertrui stopped him. ‘Approve is not the word. It’s not for you to approve or disapprove. Wait.’

  Another silence. Then:

  ‘Would you do such a thing yourself?’

  Jacob struggled with the question, remembered his tears yesterday, feared they might come again. This would not be the time. There was too much. And too little.

  Time, time! Suddenly everything seemed to be about time. A life time. Time for this, time for that. The time of your life. A time to live. No time left. A time to die.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said with steady seriousness. ‘I really don’t. In theory I would. But in … reality. It seems so …’

  Words failed him. A glottal stop in his gut.

  Clearing her throat of gravel before speaking, Geertrui said, ‘Then you are still glad to be alive.’

  A statement not a question.

  Jacob paused before saying, ‘Yes. I suppose I am.’

  ‘Even in your, what was it?’

  ‘Mouse moods.’

  ‘Yes, eve
n in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being.’ She cleared her throat again. ‘Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live. What matters—’

  A flash of pain crossed her face. She caught her breath and held it a few seconds. Sweat glazed her skin. Lying on the bed cover, her hands were clutched like claws.

  Alarmed, Jacob said, ‘Are you all right? Shall I call someone?’

  Geertrui raised a fisted hand, indicating no.

  It was a while before she relaxed again.

  ‘You must go soon.’ Her voice was strained. ‘But before, I must ask you two questions.’ She pursed her dry lips and rubbed them together. ‘Tomorrow you go to Oosterbeek. Will you come and see me again on Monday? There’s something I wish to give you.’

  ‘Sure. Yes.’

  ‘Now, the other question. Will you read something to me? A short poem.’

  Who can refuse a dying woman? ‘If you want me to. I don’t know how well—’

  ‘Your grandfather liked it. He read it to me. I read it over his grave. I should very much like to hear you read it.’

  Jacob could only nod.

  ‘The drawer of my cabinet. The book there. A slip of paper marks the page.’

  A battered, dog-eared volume, its red and cream cover faded and grubby.

  ‘The Ben Jonson?’ he asked.

  Geertrui’s head turned and her eyes were on him again, intense, devouring.

  He had never seen the poem before. He glanced through the few lines, rehearsing them in his head, fearing he might stumble over the unfamiliar Jacobean English.

  Time. Time.

  He took a breath while telling himself to be calm, to concentrate, to see only the words, follow the lines, trust the punctuation: just as he’d been taught while rehearsing the Scottish play.

  He breathed in. And began.

  ‘It is not growing like a tree

  In bulk, doth make Man better be;

  Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,

  To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:

  A lily of a day

  Is fairer far in May,

  Although it fall and die that night;

  It was the plant and flower of Light.

  In small proportions we just beauties see;

  And in short measures life may perfect be.’

  Clinical noises echoed outside.

  In the room, hospital air embalmed the silence.

  GEERTRUI

  THE INNOCENT HAPPY time came to an end early the next morning. Until then each day our rising habit was thus. Mr Wesseling got up first at five thirty. He revived the fire in the kitchen range before going off to his farm work and to make sure Dirk and Henk were awake, who then got up and milked the cows. At six Mrs Wesseling got up and cooked breakfast for seven o’clock. I got up after her and did some housework until breakfast was ready. After we had eaten I took Jacob his coffee and performed our wake-up ritual.

  But that morning Mrs Wesseling and I were still in bed and Mr Wesseling was busy reviving the fire when Dirk rushed in from the cowhouse, shouting for us all to hear, ‘Germans! Germans!’ It was a word that, like a magic spell, conjured us instantly into most vigorous action. Dirk had been dressing in the hideout when by lucky chance he saw from the skylight a German army truck turn from the main road in to our track. As soon as we heard his warning shout, Mr Wesseling rushed out to intercept the soldiers and to prevent them from entering the house for as long as possible. Mrs Wesseling ran from her room to the stairhead, yelling at Dirk to go back to the hideout. As for me, my first thought was of Jacob. I flung myself out of bed and hurried to his room, calling his name, knowing he must be roused and moved quickly somehow. But where? By the time I had reached him and shaken him awake Mrs Wesseling joined us, like me still in her night dress, her sleep-tousled hair loose about her head, and Dirk, despite his mother’s anxiety for him, was pounding up the back stairs in his bare feet. ‘Where are they?’ Mrs Wesseling was shouting to him. ‘On our road in a truck,’ Dirk called back. ‘Father’s gone to stall them.’ At the same time I was explaining to Jacob what was happening, and was helping him out of bed. But his wounded leg still could not carry his weight or even move itself without causing great pain. He was sitting on the edge of the bed when Dirk joined us. ‘Quick, quick,’ Dirk said, ‘I’ll carry him on my back.’ ‘No, no,’ Mrs Wesseling cried. ‘No time. You’ll never do it. They’ll be everywhere. Go, go! We’ll think of something.’ Just as my first thought had been of Jacob, hers was of Dirk. No matter who else was caught, herself included, her only child must not be. Dirk made an attempt at protest, but his mother, quite frantic, took him by the arms and began to push him with all her weight out of the room, crying, ‘Hide, Dirk, hide, hide!’

  By now we could hear the Germans driving in to the farm yard. And I too was becoming distraught. ‘What shall we do?’ I could hear myself saying. ‘Where shall we hide him?’ Such awful panic. I think never so much in all my life. This while I was trying to help Jacob to stand, who was also spluttering, in English of course, words I could not (then!) understand. Later he told me he was cursing himself for allowing himself to relax during the last few days when we should have planned what to do in such an emergency. But they were days, he said, when he had felt suspended, out of time, out of place, with no past and no future, only an endless, self-contained, charmed, timeless time. But now the spell was broken.

  Only when we heard orders shouted in German echoing round the yard, and the clatter of boots as soldiers spilled out of their truck, did Dirk, realising there was no time left, obey his mother and stumble away down the stairs, through the dairy in to the cowhouse, where Henk was waiting, ready to swing the ladder up in to the roof when Dirk had climbed it and to close the entrance to their hiding place as soon as they were inside. They made it in the nick of time. Mr Wesseling’s attempt to delay the soldiers with questions about what they wanted and to inspect their permit were brushed aside by the officer in charge, and the soldiers were sent to search each building: two with their officer came in to the house by the kitchen door, two in to the cowhouse by the big end door. Mr Wesseling was ordered to remain by the truck guarded by the driver.

  In the seconds after Dirk left us, Mrs Wesseling recovered her composure with a surety that astounded me. Whatever else I may say about her this I must: she possessed admirable self-discipline and remarkable courage. ‘Calm,’ she muttered as much to herself as to me. And then as if all emotion had been siphoned out of her, she glanced at me with Jacob leaning against me, his arm round my neck, looked round the room, and after a meditative pause that seemed like an eternity there came over her face an almost amused expression.

  ‘Quick,’ she said, going to the bedstee and opening the doors.

  As I do not think you have such a thing as our bedstee in England I should explain you that it is a bed in a cupboard in the wall. Many of our old houses had them. Usually they were in the kitchen-living-room at the side of the fire. During the day the bed could be shut away from view by closing the doors or a curtain. At night it was a cosy bed. And thus the little space and few rooms of the old houses could be used to the maximum without a bed getting in the way or depressing the eye during the day. Like some of the better-off farms, the Wesselings’ had a second floor and bedrooms up there. But still a bedstee provided an extra sleeping place when necessary. Luckily there was one in Jacob’s room. I had not even thought of it till now, when Mrs Wesseling opened its doors.

  ‘Get him in, get him in,’ she said, and helped me almost carry Jacob to it and tumble him in, he hopping on one foot and me explaining to him what was happening.

  ‘Now you,’ said Mrs Wesseling as soon as Jacob was lying flat on his back on the mattress.

  ‘What! Why?’ I said, breathless though I was with the exertion and excitement.

  ‘Just do it. On top of him. Quick!’ />
  At such a moment there is no time for discussion or even explanation. Already we could hear the clatter of a soldier’s boots on the stone tiles of the floor downstairs and the sharp commands of his officer. Besides, there was no resisting the force of Mrs Wesseling’s will when she was in such a determined temper.

  So in to the bedstee I clambered, and lay down flat on my back on top of Jacob. Only to find myself covered at once by the duvet, which Mrs Wesseling swept off Jacob’s bed and flung over us.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jacob whispered to me.

  ‘Quiet,’ I whispered back. ‘Don’t even breathe!’

  Now we could hear the soldier’s boots stamping up the stairs.

  ‘Look ill,’ Mrs Wesseling muttered to me before she made for the door, and surged out without a pause on to the landing, where she confronted the soldier as he reached the top of the stairs.

  ‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ I heard her demand in angry German.

  ‘Orders. Out of the way,’ replied the soldier.

  ‘How dare you! What orders? Show me your orders?’

  ‘Officer. Downstairs. Out of the way.’

  The soldier’s hobnailed boots stomped along the landing to the furthest room, Mrs Wesseling’s bare feet slapping along behind, and she harrying him all the time. ‘What do you think we are doing here? Hiding an army? We are farmers, doing our best despite everything to grow food to feed people like you. How dare you come here like this?’ And the soldier growling back at her, ‘Quiet, woman. Go away,’ as he searched the rooms.

  He was not very diligent at his job, or perhaps he just wanted to get away from Mrs Wesseling as quickly as possible, but he did little more than look under the beds, inspect inside the wardrobes (knocking the backs with his rifle butt, for it was well known that people often constructed hiding places in the wall behind a wardrobe), a few taps on the ceilings and walls for any give-away hollow sound of a cavity.