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

by Chambers, Aidan

  ‘The kind of bravery you meant this morning?’

  ‘Yes. Ordinary people’s bravery. To me that’s real bravery. But you don’t get medals for it or monuments put up for it. And now, Engelsman Jakob, with all this talk, I’m thirsty. Would you want coffee or something? We could get some before we go for your train.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  They arrived at the station with five minutes to wait. Jacob bought a ticket for Hille from a self-service machine.

  The flow of talk dried up. They stood in silence side by side, holding hands, and staring down the empty track. No one else was waiting. A lone blackbird sang from the top of a tree on the bank opposite. A car crossed the bridge. Clouds hung above them tinged by the late afternoon sun. There was a touch of autumn chill in the fading summer air.

  Jacob’s energy suddenly drained out of him. He was overcome by the strangeness of the day: of being in a foreign land, holding hands with a foreign girl he had met only six hours before while he was standing on his grandfather’s grave in a corner of a foreign field. He needed time to take it in. The thought of the journey back to Amsterdam with Hille made his head feel heavy and his body weak. Not that he wanted to leave her. No one had made him this happy for a long time. Every part of him felt better for being with her. But he also felt talked out. And what would they do in Amsterdam? Hille couldn’t just get on the next train back, could she? Should he take her to the apartment? Would Daan mind him turning up with a girl? He wished they could part now while everything was going good. But then what? Could they meet again? Would they want to after a day or two, when they’d cooled down and the excitement had worn off? Would Hille think she had made a mistake? Would he?

  His shyness had not interfered for a second from the moment he set eyes on Hille. But now it flushed through him like an overdose of some foul narcotic, a downer that paralysed his confidence and induced moody doubt. All afternoon he had felt liberated, free to be himself in a new way. A self that had been suppressed, hidden, not allowed out, had been released. He liked this new self, and told himself that he was not going to let it be shut away again.

  With an effort of will he said, ‘I’m very glad we met.’

  ‘Me too,’ Hille said, not turning to look at him.

  ‘We’ve had a great time.’

  Hille nodded.

  ‘I’d hate it to be spoilt.’

  ‘Why would it be?’

  ‘A lot’s happened. Between us, I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And seeing my grandfather’s grave … It’s affected me more than I thought it would.’

  Hille let go of his hand and turned to face him.

  ‘You need some time.’

  He looked at her. The green eyes. The lips he was already more familiar with than with anyone else’s.

  ‘It’s like part of me—you know—the part that thinks—needs to catch up with the part that does things.’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

  ‘I could get back to Amsterdam okay on my own.’

  ‘Would you prefer that?’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you. Really.’

  ‘Should I come to Utrecht? Make sure you change on to the right train? Would you like that?’

  ‘What I’d like best …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is to say goodbye now, and meet again another day. If you can. If you want to. If you would like to, I mean.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘And I’d like to.’

  ‘And I want to!’

  ‘Great! … Only … When?’

  The train came into view.

  ‘I’ve school all this week. And there’s moving our house. But I could come to Amsterdam one evening. Or you could come here. Meet me out of school.’

  ‘Okay. Should I phone?’

  The train was pulling in to the platform.

  ‘You don’t have my number.’

  ‘Shit! No, I don’t.’

  ‘Get in. I’ll come as far as Wolfheze. It’s the next station. Not far. I’ll walk home.’

  They stood in the space by the door. The train started off. Hille found a pen.

  ‘Where shall I write it?’

  Jacob took Oosterbeek 1944 from the Hartenstein bag.

  ‘On here. Your address as well, just in case.’

  Hille took the book and wrote inside the back cover. While she did this Jacob found the card on which he’d written Daan’s address and phone number.

  ‘Here, have this. Everything is a bit, well, fluid let’s say. Don’t know where I’ll be staying or for how long. But with Daan for the next few days I think. And he’ll know where I am, if I’m not there. I’ll phone. But I’d like to hear from you. If you want to.’

  Hille smiled. ‘Yes, domkop, I do do want to. Okay?’

  ‘Sorry! It’s travelling. Always hypes me a bit.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want me to come with you? At least to Utrecht?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. It’s just … you’ve got me in such a state—’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got you in such a state, have I! All Eve’s fault, is it, meneer Adamsappel! Again!’ She was laughing. ‘We’re almost at Wolfheze. Are you in too much of a state to give me a last kiss?’

  ‘Not a last last kiss, I hope.’

  ‘No,’ Hille said, taking his face in her hands. ‘Only a last kiss for now. How about that?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  GEERTRUI

  I WILL NOT say that days—or rather, nights—of bliss followed, only that this is the time of my life I hold most dear. Six weeks. Blink and it is gone. Yet it is longer in memory and fuller with memories than many of the years between then and now. It is the time I shall die thinking of. Of him then. Of Jacob, my beloved Jacob.

  After ten days confined to her room, Mrs Wesseling appeared on Sunday morning dressed ready for church. Without a word to her husband or myself as we sat eating breakfast, she cycled off. When she returned, she put on her house clothes and set about her work as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. And that afternoon she began playing the harmonium. Not then or ever afterwards was her withdrawal mentioned or even hinted at. But the change in her was complete. The old Mrs Wesseling had vanished as if she had never been; the new was the opposite of the old. It was as if nothing mattered to her any more. No more did she criticise or bustle me. No more inspect what I had done. No more advise how I should behave or instruct me in my work. No more give me orders each morning. Rather than being glad of this, I felt sorry for her. The old Mrs Wesseling may have been difficult, angering me sometimes, but she was alive and vital. Whereas the new Mrs Wesseling was like an automaton, a robot, a creature without a will or even a mind of its own, doing what she did only because she was programmed to do it. Machines are all very well, but not when they were once human beings.

  In one way only was this good for me. Mrs Wesseling no longer took any notice of the time I spent with Jacob—when I was with him and for how long, and what I was doing. If she was aware of me leaving my room to go to him at night and returning in the morning just before it was time to get up, she never said a word about it. And so I did as I pleased when I pleased, though always discreetly enough not to call attention or give offence.

  I think of this as the time when Jacob and I lived together, husband and wife in all but name. We did not talk much about the future. There was little to be said except that we wanted to spend our lives together and must do whatever had to be done to make it possible. Our first concern was to get Jacob fit and well again, and our second was to survive the war.

  Jacob no longer thought of escaping. We decided he should remain in hiding until the liberators arrived, then see what could be done to make it possible for us to stay together. If this was not allowed, if Jacob was ordered to return to England or to join the fighting forces again, then we would have to accept it, and wait until the war was over, when he would come back to me. We had not the smallest doubt that this would happen
.

  New love is like a star, it radiates energy. Young love shared is a firmament. Doubt is not available. And shut away on the farm we were living in a kind of cocoon, isolated from other people. In ordinary times we would have mixed with friends and family, telling our closest confidants of our love, of our hopes and plans, and they would have encouraged or dissuaded us, reminding us of everyday realities and helping keep our feet on the ground. As it was, we lived in a bubble of paradise we made for ourselves. With that ability common to all lovers in their first passion, we shut our minds to every thought that in the smallest measure might spoil our time together or interfere with the fantasy of our future life. Love is blind, they say, and there is none so blind as those who will not see. So the world was as we wished it to be; and if by some mischance it were not, why then, we would make it so.

  But bubbles are easily burst. We were very lucky ours remained intact for as long as it did.

  Though we tried to ignore it, the war came closer every day. The winter set in cold and wet. More and more people came trudging along the lane, begging for food, often bartering with valuables that twisted the heart: heirlooms, gold lockets for keeping a snippet of a lover’s hair, silver frames that once held treasured family photographs, stamp albums containing collections begun in childhood, even gold wedding bands were offered by the desperate.

  From these saddening visitors we heard news from the towns. Of the Germans constantly hunting for men to work for them. Of bombing raids on the Faber works in Apeldoorn. Of Arnhem being evacuated and pillaged by the SS in retribution for the help given to the British during the battle. Of Allied paratroopers dropping near Bennekom and of fighting going on around there. Someone had heard from a friend in the Hague that a sack of potatoes cost 180 guilders (a ridiculously large sum). In Rotterdam 40–60,000 men had been taken away by the Germans. Everywhere schools were closed. The trains were not running because the railway workers had gone on strike against the Germans. No one could get shoes repaired because there was nothing to repair them with (had we anything, our visitors asked, that might be made into new soles?). In places where there were large numbers of evacuees came tension, arguments, fights even, between the evacuees and the locals because of the shortage of food and accommodation. And everywhere people were on the move, migrating from one place where life had become too difficult to another place where they had heard things were easier, safer, better. In the north, Friesland, Groningen, Drente, food was said to be plentiful. And so on the word of rumour only, people set off, their few possessions on a cart or strapped to a bicycle, in search of relief. But parts of the south had been liberated, so some progress was being made. ‘But when will they reach us?’ people asked. ‘When will we be free of these barbarians?’ ‘Will it never end?’ ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’

  And they would set off back down the lane with rueful glances at us because we had not sold them more of what they were convinced was our hoard of good things: butter, cheese, fruit, bread, meat, flour, milk. The most pathetic were the women with little babies in their arms, prepared to do anything, anything at all, for a little food for their children.

  As the Winter of the Hunger wore on farmers got a bad name because so many people came to their doors pleading for help that they could not satisfy them all. Some of the visitors were violent in their desperation. In the end, fearful for their own welfare and even for their lives, many farmers turned everybody away with a hardness of heart that would have astonished and shamed them in the years before the war.

  Often too, and more and more often as the days went by, we heard fighter planes—Spitfires and Hurricanes, Jacob said—roaring low overhead. If they spotted a German vehicle, or indeed anything that might belong to the enemy, they strafed it with gunfire. We saw this happen to vehicles on the main road three or four times, wrecking the vehicle and spilling its occupants, dead or wounded, onto the road. Each time we went out and waved and cheered as if the carnage were points scored in a game. And each time we left the wreckage and its dead or wounded occupants where they were. ‘Let them rot in their own filth,’ Mr Wesseling said, and spat, before he returned to work. If the Germans had not come along and cleared things away before nightfall, the Resistance would be there in the dark, picking over the remains for anything useful.

  It was the strangest of strange times. During the day, the endless hard work of the house and farm, the worries about the war, the effort to keep my relationship with Mr and Mrs Wesseling happy. In the evening and at night in the hiding place with Jacob, the passion and tenderness of our love-making, the fun of our private talk and jokes, the consolation, the fantasy of our future together, the refreshment of the things we read and recited to each other from Sam’s book (the only one we had in English).

  Mostly while Jacob read to me or while we talked I would sew. Sewing! How much of it we did, we women, in those days. Darning the men’s socks, making underwear and our dresses, turning sheets sides to middle to prolong their life, making and remaking cushions and curtains, tablecloths and chair covers, repairing tears in the men’s work clothes, making new collars for their shirts from the shirt tails. On and on, an endless task. No one does this now. It was a chore, but in those long evenings with no such diversions as television or videos or CD music or computer games or even radio during the war, sewing was a restful, relaxing activity. While the hands and eyes were busy with gentle skill and a routine task the mind and tongue could wander freely. And, we were always told, the devil finds work for idle hands (another familiar saying). Not to be busy with such necessary work was regarded as all but a sin, and sewing was the least tedious task for the quiet hours. Besides, it encouraged the gezelligheid.

  Gezellig. I do not know how to put this in English. It is such a particularly Dutch quality, something deep in our culture and our national consciousness. My dictionary offers words like ‘cosy, companionable, sociable, togetherness’. But gezellig means very much more to us than these suggest. Less nowadays, perhaps, than in my youth. Then it was almost sacred. Anyone who disturbed the gezellig had committed a social crime. For sure, these times with Jacob possessed for me a special kind of gezellig.

  When he was not reading to me, we talked of books we loved. Jacob told me of English writers and books I had never heard of but which, after the war, I found and read for myself. And I told him of our Dutch writers I admired most. We sang to each other the popular songs we knew. He told me of his life in England, of his job as an electrician, of his liking for cricket, a game I had never seen and which he tried to explain without any success; it still baffles me. I told him how I thought of becoming a teacher, like my mother. And about my friends, and stories of my growing up. And so the hours went by. Though best of all I loved the hours in bed together.

  Away from him, outside the hiding place, it was hard to avoid the realities. The endless grind of house- and farm-work, the stress of dealing with begging visitors, the brutality of the war, and the nagging fear that we might be raided, Jacob found and all of us arrested. The exhaustion of it! The clash of emotions warring inside me. The worries and feelings of guilt that I pushed down in to the deepest recesses of my being, hiding them from myself.

  The only way I got through, the only way I survived, was by living moment to moment, second by second of the day and the night. There was only now. This instant. Allowing nothing else. No memories. No thoughts of tomorrow. Away from Jacob, I locked myself inside myself, threw myself into the work to be done so that the time away from him would pass as quickly as possible and whatever happened would affect me as little as possible. Then, back with him in the hiding place, I unlocked myself, opened to him, concentrated only on him, poured myself into him. There is no other way I know how to put it than to say: He was the whole world to me.

  The strangest time, the most intense I have ever known. How could my time with Jacob ever be surpassed? Ever equalled? And life being what it is, how could it last?

  Of course, it did not.

  The
end came on the first bright sunny day for two or three weeks. One of those nostalgic days in winter that are a memory of summer gone and a foretaste of summer to come. It reminded me of the Sunday morning in September when I saw parachutes filling the sky as I cycled home from the farm. How long ago it seemed, how different a person I was now from the girl who raced home calling out to herself, ‘Free, free!’

  It was such a lovely day, calm and mild, that in the morning I hung out some bed sheets to dry in the garden. It would be so nice to smell fresh air in them when we went to bed, instead of the heavy hay-smell of the barn where we usually dried them in winter time. Just before sunset, I went to take them in. Mrs Wesseling was playing the harmonium in the room which looked out onto the garden. She had opened the window, as we had opened all the windows of the house that day to air the rooms. She was still at the stage of teaching herself again, after the intervening years when she had not played, by using the lessons she had learned as a child. I cannot forget the little piece she was practising that afternoon, a simple waltz by Becucci. The music spilled around me as I took in the sheets and folded them. I had been with Jacob after the mid-day meal. He was urgent that day, full of desire, and I was still hot from the pleasure of it. He had worked so hard at getting himself fit, his wound was healing well, he was walking almost normally again, and he was becoming very strong. I remember feeling weak with happiness and impatient for night to come so that we could be together again.