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

by Chambers, Aidan

‘No problem,’ Hille said, grinned and, mimicking with shocking accuracy, intoned to Jacob, ‘Put yourself in my hands. Relax. Enjoy yourself. Trust me to land you safely in Amsterdam.’

  GEERTRUI

  MRS WESSELING WAS so deranged by her son’s action that she would not leave her room for days. It was as if Dirk had died. She kept repeating, like a mantra, that she would never see him again. In her grief she blamed Henk, saying he persuaded Dirk to leave. She blamed me for coming to the farm and unsettling her son. She blamed me too for bringing Jacob with me and putting her family in even more danger than they were before. She blamed her husband for not being more firm with their son. Worst of all in its vehemence, she blamed herself for allowing this to happen. She should have sent Henk away the first day he and Dirk decided to go into hiding; she should have sent all three of us away the night we arrived; she even said she should have let the Germans find Jacob instead of hiding him in the bedstee, because at least that would have saved her son.

  Her torment was painful to behold. And nothing Mr Wesseling or I could do soothed her anguish. It was a shock to see an adult who I had known only as a strong woman, controlled in every way, indomitable, so suddenly crumble, becoming almost infantile in her distress. Another lesson, one of the most affecting of my life, in how fragile is human nature. In the moment it took to read her son’s letter this mature, experienced, dominant woman disintegrated as if the yarn that held the garment of her self together had been pulled out and she had unravelled into a tangle of twisted thread. And though Dirk did eventually return, she never completely recovered her former self, never became the confident, imposing person she had been, but for the rest of her life was a nervous, uncertain woman, withdrawn, hard to amuse, always expecting the worst. Her one constant pleasure, and I often thought her only consolation, was playing the harmonium, an instrument she had learned as a child, but had given up in her teenage years, and now took up again as if she had never left off. She played it only for herself, sometimes for hours on end, never liking anyone else to listen, and invested in her playing all of herself that before she had poured into her son. It was as if, while playing the harmonium, she lived another life, an alternative life that did not fail her as her other everyday life had failed her. Until in the end, before she died, playing the harmonium and listening to records of other people playing it, became her world, and there was nothing besides. All else had vanished, her husband, her son, her previous life forgotten. She remembered only music and the logic of the keyboard. She died of cancer in her early sixties while fingering on the counterpane of her bed the notes of some composition only she could hear.

  But I have reached ahead of myself. Let us go back to the days after Dirk and Henk disappeared.

  Mr Wesseling was of course upset, but took it better than his wife and with optimism. They’ll return, he said, probably in a few days, when the anger is out of their system and they find it is not so easy as they think to fight like a guerrilla. As for his wife, at first he regarded her withdrawal with the same down-to-earth acceptance. He was not an imaginative man, but phlegmatic and fatalistic. For him always, things were as they were, that was life, and you did well to make the best of it. There was an expression he frequently used: It’s God’s way with us that we deserve what we get. Besides, women were a mystery to him, their peculiarities beyond explanation. Their domain was the house and the domestic animals, with which he did not interfere. So when his wife took to her room, he shrugged it off as merely a woman’s reaction to bad news, and left her care to me along with the rest of the ‘woman’s work’, paying me no attention, except to say, ‘You’ll be worried about your brother. He’ll be all right. They’re resourceful boys.’ And that was that. Back to work. The unremitting toil of a farm, where animals and crops never take a holiday nor allow those who tend them any time off. The land is a cruel master. And the best I can say of Mr Wesseling is that he loved it and tended it with complete devotion. It was his redeeming quality, and, I must say, I always liked him and got along well with him.

  However, Mrs Wesseling was right: I was not born to the farming life and was not the type for it either. I do not know how I would have survived the next few days had it not been for Jacob. But for him my guess is that I would have given up and abandoned the Wesselings as abruptly as had my brother and Dirk, no matter what pangs of guilt I would have felt at such desertion. But Jacob was entirely my responsibility. I had taken him on against everyone’s advice, and to forsake him now would have been to forsake myself. I would never have been able to live with myself ever after. Because of Jacob I had to stay with the Wesselings, had to do whatever work fell to me, however weary and distressed I felt. And must do all I could to help him become fit enough to survive. I do not say escape, because already, though only half-consciously acknowledged to myself, I dreaded the day when he would leave me.

  So Mrs Wesseling withdrew to her room, Mr Wesseling buried himself in his work, and I fled from the burden of the housework whenever I could to be with Jacob.

  Most of these times with him were in the evenings after our meal. Mr Wesseling would go off to listen to Radio Oranje from England, and I would go to Jacob, with the extra excuse that the skylight in the roof of the hiding place gave the best view of the main road and the track to the house, so I could keep watch for unwanted visitors while Mr Wesseling listened to the broadcast. He would come to us afterwards, tell us the latest news of the war, check on Jacob’s progress, then leave us together while he went to sit with his wife. His English was very poor so he never stayed with us for long.

  Now, after Jacob being so dependent on me for his physical needs, I became dependent on him for emotional support. He was my only confidant. Few men are good listeners. (At least, it was so in my young days. Is it different now?) But Jacob was. And for a day or two after Henk’s departure he had a lot of listening to do as I poured out my distress at the loss of my brother, my anxieties about my parents, my complaints about Mrs Wesseling, my lonely plight, and my fears for each one of us. Everything which till then I had so carefully guarded and kept from him because I had been so determined to keep up my spirits and not depress Jacob lest I hinder his recovery. I suppose I had thought of myself as his rescuer, his nurse, even, as he called me, his guardian angel. His Maria. Now, in a day, this changed. The dyke was breached, my emotions flooded out in a deluge, and Jacob became my refuge, my protector, my companion.

  And it was such a relief! Not to have to be strong all the time, not to have to appear cheerful and optimistic, not to have to be decisive, not to have to be always undaunted. Not to have to pretend so much. But just to be. I think I wallowed in the luxury. For a day or two at least. And Jacob did not discourage me. What a release! Like a prisoner unchained.

  One evening, as we sat either side of the little makeshift table in the hiding place, the sound and smell of the cows in their stalls below filtering to us through the walls of hay, I cried as I talked. Cooped up as we were, yet it was like walking out in to the rain after a long dusty time inside.

  And as if we were friends walking in the rain, Jacob reached out, and we held hands across the table. This was the first time we made such intimate contact. As I have told you, I had washed this man, including his most private parts, many times. I had cradled him while he slept in our cellar during the worst of his suffering. I had fed him mouthful by mouthful as one feeds a baby. I had changed the dressings on his wounds. I had even assisted him as he used the lavatory. There was nothing of his body I did not know and had not touched. But that was the touch of his dutiful nurse, his angel Maria.

  There had, of course, been the moment in the bedstee, and the desires and fantasies that had aroused. But I had tried to suppress them, had tried not to let myself think of them. In those old-fashioned words no one uses seriously any more, I had remained chaste. What had happened, I told myself, had been no more than an accident and must not be dwelt on. Even though at night I could not get it out of my mind or, worse, out of my dream
s.

  But now it was not Angel Maria who touched him, it was he who touched me, Geertrui, reaching across the table to take my hand as I talked and wept. I did not resist. At that moment nothing could have given me more comfort, nor more pleasure, than my hand held in his. Yet what confusion of emotions it stirred in me, as my distress and fears blended with the desires and longings that had kept me awake at nights and which now at last found a response, an outlet, a reply, a physical confirmation in the caress of his fingers on mine.

  Instantly, in the second his hand took mine, I no longer thought of him as a wounded soldier, an escapee, a foreigner. Nor, honesty requires that I add, as a married man either. But only as mine and myself as his. In that uncompromising second I gave myself completely to him. And did so consciously, wilfully (not, please note, willingly, but wilfully). And have never thought of him or of myself in any other way from that day to this.

  I want to be clear. Not for a part of a second did I hold back, resist, demur. I propose no explanation, make no excuse. Nor do I offer the slightest regret. Quite the opposite. I cling to this moment, this decision. And endure its consequences. Of nothing in my life am I as certain as I am of my love for Jacob. Had he lived, I would have done everything in my power to keep him.

  That evening we talked, held hands, gazed in to one another’s eyes, as lovers have done forever in that delicious time when they first acknowledge one another. No more than this. We did not even kiss. Yet it seemed to us that all our lives were there with us in that makeshift secret room. As that favourite poem I mentioned earlier puts it: ‘in short measures life may perfect be’. There is no more. There can be nothing better. The two hours or so which Jacob and I spent together that night were a measure of perfection. Brought to an end by Mr Wesseling calling to me from below, on the excuse of reminding me how late it was, and waiting for me to join him at the bottom of the ladder after I had said a hasty goodnight to Jacob.

  I did not resent Mr Wesseling’s intrusion, but liked him for it. He added to the excitement of the evening and gave me a sense of security, of my welfare being watched over by a fatherly eye. And by then, after so many stressful days away from my parents (the first time in my life I had been away from them for so long), I needed such reassuring papa-love as much as I was ready and longing for the unsettling passion of falling-in-love for the first time.

  You will rightly guess that I slept very little that night. And that my mind was lively with new hope. Hope for what the future with Jacob might be like, where we would live and how. New love has tunnel vision, its retina is a movie screen, it views the world remade in its own amotopian image.

  Next day the unremade world was just as it had been the day before, only worse. Colder, muddier, dustier, bleaker. And my predicament—servant to Mrs Wesseling, farmgirl-housekeeper to Mr Wesseling—more of a burden than ever. All I wanted, all I pined for was to be alone with Jacob. But thank my genes, I am blessed with an active nature. The lower my spirits plunge the greater my impulse to be up and doing. An inheritance from my mother. So I threw myself into my chores with a frenzy forged of frustrated desire.

  Yet so perverse is human nature, each time I saw Jacob during that day, to take him his breakfast and mid-day meal, hot water to wash in, return laundered clothes, I was overcome with such chronic shyness that I could hardly look him in the eyes. I tried to behave as matter-of-factly as possible, tried to bustle about as if too busy to stop and talk, tried to pretend that nothing had changed between us, that I was still only his friendly nurse Maria. But of course it was useless. Everything had changed. Harder than looking at him was touching him, and hardest of all, being touched by him. Usually, I changed the dressing on Jacob’s wounded leg after breakfast. But this morning his leg was no longer merely a wounded limb, it was a part of the desired body of the loved one, which I craved to kiss and caress. So I muttered something about an urgent problem with Mrs Wesseling to put off changing his dressing till later, when, I hoped, I had prepared myself.

  ‘Later’ came after the mid-day meal. We had always spent half an hour together then, relaxing before the afternoon’s work. That morning Mr Wesseling had cleared out dung and used straw from the cowhouse. Jacob had helped by hobbling about on the gallery, forking fresh hay and straw down to Mr Wesseling. By mid-day he was dusty and sweaty, his bandage was grubby, had worked loose and was annoying him. If I did not want to change it, he said irritably when I took him his meal, he would do it himself. But this I could not allow. No hands but mine, not even Jacob’s, must tend my patient, my beloved. Such jealousy! I had never felt a hint of it before. Till then, I thought of jealousy as an ugly weakness, which I viewed with scorn. Now it seized me in an unmistakable spasm of emotional cramp that took me by surprise and flustered me all the more.

  Without a word I scampered off to collect a pitcher of hot water and fresh dressings. When I returned Jacob was sitting on the bed in his underwear, having given himself as good a wash as he could manage in cold water. I had seen my patient like that often, but not since our changeful time together the night before. I wanted to throw myself in to his arms. Instead, tried to act my former self. But bustled too clumsily. Into the basin I poured water from the pitcher, but sloppily. Onto one knee at his feet I went down with a painful bump. With trembling hands I took the end of bandage that had come loose above his knee and began to unwind it from his leg. But because my fingers were all thumbs I fumbled as I rolled the unwinding ribbon, which fell into the basin of water by my side. As if the basin were a reservoir piped to my eyes, this ineptitude produced a flow of tears. Which I forced myself to ignore, keeping my head down so that Jacob should not see them, while I reached into the basin with slow-motion control, retrieved the drowned bandage, and with studied care went on unwinding the remainder from his leg, after which I laid the roll of soiled cloth aside. Stood. Discarded the contaminated water. Rubbed the basin clean. Placed it on the floor again. Poured more, now only tepid water in to it from the pitcher. Bent over Jacob’s leg and was about to start removing the dressing that covered the wound—always the worst part of the process because congealed blood glued the dressing to the sore, making it painful to strip off—when Jacob’s hands took me by the shoulders and, using me to support himself, got to his feet, and still holding me, waited until I could no longer keep my head bowed, could not help but look him in the face, and look at last in to his eyes. Those eyes that from first sight had bewitched my heart.

  Such a moment, such stasis, is not to be endured for long. There can only be advance or retreat, acceptance or rejection, acknowledgement or denial. What else could there be from me then but advance, acceptance, acknowledgement? With the clarity of unthinking instinct I raised a hand and drew his face with my fingers, from brow and temple to lips and chin. The stubble of his unshaven cheek sent a tingle down my thighs. As my fingers cupped his chin, he leaned towards me and kissed my lips with lingering delicacy. Grasping his head with both hands, and rising on my toes, I kissed the lids of his closing eyes, first right then left. Wrapped my arms around his neck. Pressed myself close, all of myself, firmly to him. And for the second time felt his sex swell, but now against my belly, and with trembling pleasure at the fact of it, the sign of his desire for me, and the longing to know the power that it stirred in me.

  Not a word was spoken, only the exhaling of sighs and crooning of pleasure that is the glossolalia of love.

  (What a foolish old woman I am to tell you all this! What can the detail of it matter to you? Am I not merely embarrassing you? Besides, love-making is so universally the same that there is never anything to tell of it that is not a cliché. But like those tedious holiday-making travellers who turn up to coffee armed with their snapshots, I am impelled to spell it out by some irresistible compulsion. To relive it myself, perhaps? To memorialise something that fixed the rest of my life? To confirm its reality? No matter.)

  We clung to each other, kissing deeply, for some long while, the brevity of which was agonising. No more
that day than this. At last reluctantly breaking apart when we heard the sound of Mr Wesseling returning to work among the cows.

  After quickly redressing Jacob’s wound, I hurried back to my chores with a bursting urgency, my blood singing, my thoughts in confusion, and longing longing longing for more.

  Other signs of my condition I won’t dwell upon, such as the flush of my skin, the perking of my breasts with the imprint of Jacob’s chest upon them, the almost painful ache in my womb, the wetness under my arms and between my legs. Thank heaven there was no one in the house to observe my fluster and bliss. By the time of the evening meal I had collected myself, but knew that if I took Jacob his food I would return in disarray again, even if I could tear myself away from him. So I asked Mr Wesseling to take it to him, with a message that I would visit later.

  But I did not go later. Or, I mean, not later that evening. A great nervousness gripped me. I could not trust myself. How would I behave? How should I behave? How would Jacob behave? And how should I respond to him? Would I know how? There was fear as well as longing in my passion.

  What is more, suddenly I felt unfit for him. My body dirty, my clothes dowdy and faded, shapeless and unlovely. Of what did I smell? That evening’s cooking? The dust of the house? The hen coop where I had just been to lock the hens up for the night? The cheesy smell of the dairy, where I’d spent half an hour working the machine that separated the cream from the day’s milk? Or my own body sweat and sex odour? The thought appalled me. I could not bear myself a moment longer. It was as if my outer self was a repulsive carapace, a hardened shell, old and outworn, imprisoning a new self that strained to break free. I wanted to discard it like a snake sheds its skin or a butterfly its chrysalis as it emerges from the husk. Wanted to? No, no. Had to! Not a possibility. Not something wished for. But an imperative. A necessity. A biological requirement.