‘Our Jews?’
‘Our Jews, Pam, Amsterdam’s Jews.’
Was he one? If he was, he wouldn’t say so now, and neither would she. As much as she liked him, she didn’t know whether she could trust him. Wouldn’t it be clever of him to talk this way, if he didn’t want anybody to know he was happy the Germans had won? He was standing so close that she could feel his breath when he laughed. They’d never exchanged more than a few words, did he think her compliment meant anything? Anything special? She moved away, putting space between them as casually as she could and hoping he wouldn’t feel, what? She didn’t know what she felt.
But he hadn’t noticed and he said, ‘And do you know what the answer was?’ The actor in him taking over, he narrowed his eyes and thrust his shoulders back and his chin up. In a deep voice unlike his own, he quoted, ‘“If we don’t see them, they won’t see us.”' He blew out a breath and went on, ‘If we take that as a promise, we’re either naïve or crazy.’
‘Maybe he meant,’ somebody tapped her shoulder, she turned to see Ted and went on, ‘Maybe they don’t want,’ and couldn’t think what she wanted to say.
Marcus and Ted shook hands and Ted said, ‘Sorry I’m late, the lecture went over time. Why’s everybody hanging around?’
Before she or Marcus could explain, a row of motorcycles with sidecars appeared around the bend in the street. As it came toward them, Pam saw some of the women raise their arms to salute. A few girls waved excitedly, and a few soldiers waved back.
The first cars after that pulled small cannons, behind them came trucks and tanks, and then rows of soldiers in black uniforms and helmets marched past. A girl standing behind them said, ‘Aren’t they gorgeous!’ and Marcus started to laugh.
‘What did I tell you! Of course they’re gorgeous! Look at those black boots, no, listen to them,’ and Pam heard how each boot hit the brick street in step with all the others, keeping time to some music in their heads, the rhythm of an advancing army confirming its victory. ‘The town is taken,’ she quoted, and Marcus said, ‘Act one, scene ten? Lots more to come.’
Ted took her arm and turned her around. ‘Come on, Pam, we’ve seen enough.’
They shook hands with Marcus and went back through the arcade and out onto the canal behind it. There was a small café on the corner with two tables on the sidewalk, and Ted said, ‘Let’s sit here. We won’t have to watch those devils or hear them.’
‘Or the girls! Did you see them, Ted, giggling and waving? And did you hear that girl behind us, did you hear what she said? They’re gorgeous? A week ago they were shooting our soldiers!’
‘Oh sure, but don’t men in uniform always look heroic? What difference does the color of the uniform make? And even if they’ve never been in a battle, because who goes into battle these days. You get in a plane and drop bombs on innocent people so far below you that you can’t see whether they’re men or women or babies. And then you fly home, kiss your wife and children and have dinner. Very heroic that.’
‘Oh Ted,’ she reached across the table for his clenched hands. ‘I’m so glad you and Adrian aren’t in the army, I don’t want you to have to fight. Besides, you couldn’t kill anybody, I know that!’
‘Do you? I don’t. I’ve never thought about it, I suppose, because I’ve never needed to. Adrian said once that pacifism is a noble belief as long as you’re among friends, but it’s a coward’s excuse when the struggle begins.’
Did she believe that, that only cowards refuse to kill their enemies? If you’ve never had an enemy, how could you know what you would or wouldn’t do, what kind of person you would be, noble or cowardly, when the moment came. Would those gorgeous young men look at her and see an enemy? ‘I don’t want to be somebody’s enemy,’ she said suddenly, blinking back unexpected tears.
‘Sorry?’ He looked up from the menu and frowned. ‘Pam, what?’
‘It’s nothing. I was just feeling sorry for myself. Not very noble, am I?’
‘Who said you have to be! Were you thinking about what Adrian said?’
She nodded. ‘And I thought, I don’t want to be somebody’s enemy, but I am, we are, aren’t we?’
‘Maybe not, little one.’ He hadn’t called her that in years, and it made them both laugh.
‘Don’t baby me, Teddie, don’t maybe me!’
‘All right, tell me what to say.’
‘Say, we’re going to be brave when we have to be.’
‘When we have to be,’
‘But not yet.’
‘But not yet.’
‘What’s on the menu?’ She leaned back and raised her face to the sun. ‘May I have a beer, Teddie? Am I old enough?’
‘As of today! And let’s have a really smashing lunch,’ he said. ‘Let’s eat, drink and be merry!’
‘For tomorrow we die!’
Quotations had to be finished, even if you wanted them not to be true. Looking past him, she saw a young man and woman standing in the sun at the end of the street. The man bent and kissed his companion, then pushed her gently away from him around the corner.
When he turned around, Pam said, ‘Oh look, there’s Simon!’ and waved.
‘What are you doing in this shabby little corner of our city?’ Simon asked. He pulled a chair away from the other table and sat down with them. ‘Oh right, you’ve been to classes. What good children you are.’
Their cousin had been to boarding school in Switzerland, one of the best and most expensive, after he’d been thrown out of almost every school in Amsterdam. He was home a year now and still hadn’t decided what to do next. Aunt Rezi was too good to her only son, that was the trouble. He was charming and clever and would be a success at whatever he chose to do. It was just a matter of finding the right thing.
‘We were getting away from the victory march,’ Ted said. ‘And you?’
‘Victory march? Have I missed something?’
‘You missed the gorgeous men,’ Pam said. ‘But you aren’t interested in men, are you. Who was that pretty girl you were kissing?’
‘Oh, Lisette! Her father has a farm up in Waterland, and he’s going to stable Homerus for me.’
‘Can’t he stay where he is?’
‘And get recruited by the Nazis? No thank you! I’d rather have him pull a plow.’ He made a face that told them it was the last thing he wanted for his beautiful white show jumper.
She’d seen him last at his sister Miriam’s birthday party a week before the invasion. They had walked down to the end of the garden, away from the music, and talked about nothing in particular until she said, ‘Mother said you volunteered. Is there really going to be a war?’
‘There already is, in case you haven’t noticed.’ He grinned at her. ‘Not our war.’ He waved vaguely at the west, where the moon was just about to slip below the houses on the other side of the park.‘The draft is just those old men in The Hague being over-careful. I don’t mind, it’s rather fun actually, but it’s not necessary, believe me.’
‘That’s not what your father’s newspaper says.’
Uncle Abel’s newspaper was the only one she trusted, even though there were a lot of things he knew but couldn’t print, things he told her father. She knew he had been worried for a long time. ‘Lots of people say we have to take sides. I’m sure he thinks so.’
‘Of course he does, he believes taking sides is what good people have to do. He feels that way about a lot of things. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I don’t think we have anything to worry about. We’re more useful to Germany if we stay neutral, like last time. An invasion? No, I just don’t think it’s going to happen.’
‘There are a lot of people who think it will, and a lot who want it to, you know that. They’d like the Nazis to come here and sort us out. Your father worries about that more than anything.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose he does. Especially since he suddenly decided we’re Jewish. But honestly, Pam, are we? When did any of us ever go to a synagogue? A friend of mine once called
me a “Christmas Tree Jew”. It’s the best of both worlds.’
‘I don’t think that will protect you if the Germans come here.’
‘They’re not coming! Forget it, Pam, we’re not worth the trouble.’
‘Why did you volunteer then?’
‘It’s what you do! A girl wouldn’t understand, I suppose, but you don’t want to look back when you’re an old man and realize you missed the big show.’
‘Show!’
‘Oh, you know what I mean, we’ll put on our uniforms, polish our boots, march past the queen’s palace, shoot off a few cannons in the dunes, send up our fleet of T5 fighters to impress the natives, and then settle down again to doing business with both sides.’ He was laughing, as much at his own eagerness to play soldier as at the foolishness he was describing.
‘Why didn’t you wait to be called up?’
‘I figured I could get into the cavalry with Homerus if I turned up smartly one morning. The cavalry needs all the horses it can get.’
‘That sounds romantic and old-fashioned.’
‘You’re right, it is old-fashioned. They wouldn’t have me, you need to be a count or a baron at least. Anyway, Homerus was too willful for them, he’s a jumper, not a plodder. I would have settled for the mounted artillery, almost as good really, just on other people’s horses.’ If it had hurt him, he wouldn’t admit it. Men might feel disappointed, but they had to get over it quickly and move on.
Now, a week later and everything changed, here they were ordering sandwiches and beers, lolling in the sunlight as if the tanks and cannon and black-booted men were the props and cast for a movie somebody was making somewhere else. When Pam shuddered, Ted asked, ‘Cold?’ and she shook her head.
‘So what now, cousin?’ Ted asked.
‘Ah, what now! I suppose we sit back and wait to see what they want us for.’
‘You’d work for them?’
‘Of course not! But we need to go about our business and keep the country running. We’ll go on buying and selling, that’s useful for both sides. At least that’s what I’ve read, and I believe it.’
Ted shook his head and Pam asked, ‘You read the Telegraph?’
‘Sure, what do you read, that Marxist rag, what’s it called, The People?’
Pam looked at him crossly, and he pretended to back away. What an idiot he was. He wasn’t pro-Nazi, he wasn’t anything, just a playboy with a rich father and a horse. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t read that rag, as you call it, which it isn’t, by the way.’
‘Sorry, of course you don’t. But it’s stupid to say all the Germans are criminals and monsters. We don’t really know everything about what’s going on over there. One paper says one thing, and another says something else. Who are we supposed to believe?’
‘Simon, for heaven’s sake,’ Ted said. ‘What’s going on over there, as you so nicely put it, is monstrous! After all the arrests and robberies and their filthy propaganda and the way they’ve gobbled up half a dozen countries, how can you say we don’t know?’
Thinking of the girls waving to the soldiers, Pam said, ‘You didn’t see all those women saluting the soldiers, did you? They don’t know anything about the Nazis, and maybe they wouldn’t care if they did know.’
‘Most people don’t,’ Ted said. ‘At least they don’t care what happens to people they don’t know. Why should they? They can’t do anything about it, they can’t even influence most of what happens to themselves. Look at us. We read the papers and the books, listen to speeches, have opinions about things we think are important, we vote and things happen. Are we any different from those ladies welcoming the jack-booted citizens we just saw marching past?’
‘Maybe we know what we want and they don’t?’ she asked, knowing the moment she said it how arrogant it sounded.
‘They know what they want, but it’s not always what we want.’
‘You mean that fathead Mussert and his Dutch version of National Socialism?’ Simon asked. ‘Have you ever seen him give that pathetic salute? He hopes we’ll become a German province and Hitler will make him the governor.’
They had heard Mussert speak on the radio about a new Europe, a people’s Europe, whatever that meant. Most people didn’t know he was quoting Hitler, 'The new Europe will be born in blood and tears!' The Telegraph had printed the speech the next day, and she saw her father tear it out and put it aside. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Destroy enough buildings, spill enough blood, and there you are, Utopia at last!’
Their sandwiches and beers came, and for a few minutes nobody spoke. Then Ted said, ‘Forget Mussert, Simon. He’s a joke in Berlin too. And it’s not going to be business as usual. What do you imagine those tanks and guns are for that they just paraded past our noses? Do you really think they’re going to be nicer to us than to any other country they’ve conquered? That they’re not going to rob us the way they’re robbing the rest of Europe?’
‘What have we got to offer? Cows, pigs and tulips? Come on, Ted, what they want is grain and oil. Lebensraum, space! Eastern Europe is their backyard, and a rich one too.’
‘What about all our colonies in the East Indies and the Caribbean?’ Pam put in. ‘We’re a small country, but our empire’s almost as big as England’s. They’ll take all that now.’
‘You’d make a good salesman for Holland. Maybe Goebbels should hire you for his propaganda department.‘
‘That’s not funny, Simon,’ Ted said. ‘What’s serious is that, when they’re ready to invade England, they’ll do it from here. Shouldn’t we try to stop that?’
‘Relax, kids, it’s going to be all right. You don’t believe it? Well, I do, but then I’m an optimist, and I’ll fight to the death to stay that way.’
‘You may have to,’ Pam warned him, but he laughed and stood up. ‘Oh, wait, Simon! Where are Miriam and Anne? Did they go to France?’ A month on the Cote d’Azur was Miriam’s birthday present.
‘They had to give it up. They planned to drive through Belgium, but that’s out now, and nobody knows what’s really happening in France.’
Pam said, ‘I’ll phone them this evening,’ and they watched him walk away.
‘‘The optimist is worried,’ Ted said, ‘but he’d never admit it. What a poseur.’
‘What a nice word!’
‘It’s not nice, and I’m sorry I said it. Simon’s not a phony. He just wants everybody to be comfortable and happy and to enjoy life the way he does. He doesn’t want to know if they don’t. If they can’t.’
‘He’ll find out,’ Pam said.
‘He will indeed.’
3 Jo, June 1940
‘I wish I knew as much about history as you do,’ Lysbet said admiringly.
Jo shook her head. ‘No really, I saw what you were doing.’
‘What was I doing?”
‘Not putting up your hand when Mr Stoffels asked a question. I could see you wanted to, Jo, you wiggle your fingers!’ Jo laughed and Lysbet went on, ‘And I wish I liked to read as much as you do.’
‘It’s not that. My father tells me lots of things. He reads about history, about the Great War and the Red and White Russians and the war in Spain, things like that. He tells me, I guess, because my mother isn’t interested.’
‘I’m not either. What we have to know for the exams is more than enough.’
‘But the more you know, the easier it is to remember.’ Lysbet looked at her doubtfully. ‘I mean, it’s like the stories Mr Stoffels tells us. It’s much easier to remember the dates and the names of the places, if you can imagine someone who lived then. History is about real people like us.’
‘Like us? We’re not like them anymore.’
Jo started to explain, then a hand smacked her shoulder and pushed her off-balance. As Lysbet steadied her, she turned to see who was behind her.
A boy she’d passed sometimes in the hall, not from her class, was standing on the step just above her. He was wearing the light blue shirt all the boys in the NSB youth cl
ub wore.
‘Out of the way, whore,’ he said. ‘You too, Yid-pal.’ He jumped around them, his elbow knocked Jo’s books out of her arms, and two girls coming down behind him started to laugh.
Lysbet kneeled down to help Jo stack her books and tuck loose papers safely inside them. ‘Those girls are in the National Youth,’ she whispered. ‘I saw them handing out their newspaper yesterday. The rector made them stop. He said they can’t do that inside the school, it’s propaganda.’
Pressing her books against her chest, Jo stood up and started down the steps. ‘I have to go now. We have to get our ration cards today.’ What that boy had said, those words she knew but had never said, they couldn’t talk about that. Around the corner and out of sight she sat down on a low wall. She knew what the words meant. How could he call her that and then laugh as if it were a joke? And to say that to Lysbet! What were they thinking, those girls?
She looked up at the sky, squinting against its bright cloudless June light. She thought about meeting Lysbet on the first day they had come to high school, twelve years old, in awe of the big girls and boys who stormed through the halls between classes, expecting the little ones to get out of their way. After the French teacher put them together at one desk on that first Monday, they stayed together just to have something familiar to hold on to, and then they found so many other reasons to become friends. Best friends.
They joined the school choir, traded sandwiches, loaned pens and notepaper, things you did for a friend. Jo wrote for the school newspaper, Lysbet took up folk dancing. Jo fell secretly and successively in love with the most intelligent and boring boys in their class, Lysbet said all the boys were juvenile, her favorite word that year. She always knew which girls were the inner circle or the most popular and what they were up to. Jo found it interesting but not worth a whole afternoon’s gossip. In some ways they weren’t alike at all, but that seemed to make their friendship even more wonderful.
The Time Between Page 3