Three of the nurses were sitting around the table in the kitchen, a basement room with a stone floor cold to your feet even through shoes and woolen stockings. She set the trays on the counter near the sink and left them for someone else to scavenge. There was still stew in a pot on the stove, and a few slices of bread on a board in the middle of the table.
At the head of the table, her starched cap firmly anchored on her gray hair, Mrs Moll sat silently peeling an orange. Nobody looked at her. Didn’t she know how mean it was to sit there enjoying something she couldn’t share? She’d probably gotten it from the German officer who came every month to check her books. She always smiled when she greeted him and offered him a cup of coffee. Martin said it was important to make him feel comfortable, Moll wouldn’t want him to look too carefully at her bookkeeping, but the nurses thought he acted more like an old friend than an inspector. ‘Or a lover,’ Nettie said, which made them giggle. Moll and a lover!
A young man Hannah hadn’t seen before pulled a chair out for her. He had a nice smile, who was he? Since Martin had started to ignore her, she needed someone to smile at her like that, and she smiled back. Only Nettie noticed and grinned at her.
He put his hand out sideways to shake hers. ‘Hans,’ he said.
‘Hannah.’
‘Hans and Hannah. It’s like the title of a kid’s book, isn’t it? Hans and Hannah solve the mystery.’
He was teasing her, trying to make her laugh. Martin was sweet but so responsible. She’d liked it at first, that he was the one who decided when they would meet and where. But then he’d decided she was just one of the nurses, after all, and it hurt. ‘What mystery are we supposed to be solving?’
‘The mystery of life? What’s going to happen to us?’
Hannah looked quickly at Mrs Moll, who seemed to be paying attention only to her orange. If they didn’t talk about the occupation, she didn’t care what they talked about. Like Aunt Mina, she thought discussing politics always led to arguments. And these days that was dangerous. She worried about her staff and her hospital, afraid someone would say the wrong thing to one of the patients and get them all into trouble. She stood between them and the world.
‘I know what’s going to happen to me,’ Hannah answered. ‘The same thing that happened last month and last week and yesterday and today.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t count on it. Life is full of surprises. Look what happened yesterday! Just like that, a strike! I wonder if it was even planned. This morning, coming to work, I thought about whether I should, come to work I mean.’ Mrs Moll looked up at that, frowning. ‘Oh,’ he told her, ‘I wouldn’t have not come! But with so many people on strike, you need to show you’re on their side. If more and more of us,’
‘Tram conductors are one thing,’ Mrs Moll interrupted, ‘and doctors and nurses are another.’ She waved her hand at the two nurses sitting at the end of the table. ‘If you’re finished, start getting the second floor settled,’ she ordered, and they put their dishes on the counter and went out.
‘Yes,’ Hans said, ‘of course, but,' He looked at Mrs Moll, who was no longer looking at him, and put his fork in his mouth.
‘I don’t see that it makes any difference,’ Hannah said. ‘Most people won’t join them, and in a few days they’ll all be back at work.’
Hans turned to look at her. ‘You might be right that most people won’t. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if they did?’
‘Should we start a revolution?’ Nettie asked. ‘No chance of that!’
Hannah agreed. Like everybody else, she just wanted to get through each day as it came. If it was going to get harder, and she thought it probably would, she didn’t want to think about it beforehand.
Hans laughed. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to climb the barricades. If there’s a parade, I’ll march in the rear.’
‘Carrying a flag?’ Hannah asked.
‘A white one, yes, absolutely.’ They smiled at each other.
Mrs Moll scraped back her chair and stood up. ‘Nettie and Hannah, the dishes please. Hans, I have some samples for the lab in my office.’ She marched out, shoulders stiff with authority, expecting Hans to follow her, and he took the last piece of bread, smiled at them both and left.
‘Is that where he’s working, in the lab?’ Hannah asked. ‘He’s not a doctor?’
‘Cute, isn’t he? He looks Jewish though, doesn’t he, that big nose? But he can’t be. Moll wouldn’t take a chance like that. I heard he hasn’t finished his medical training, but I suppose he knows how to test blood and pee.’
Hannah took her bowl to the sink and added it to the trays and dishes there. Filling the biggest pot with water, she set it on a high flame to boil while they sorted out the food that was still edible from the scraps.
‘Martin's in today,’ Nettie said.
‘Yes, I noticed.’
‘What happened? I thought you two liked each other, but I never see you together anymore.’
‘Why should you? He’s a doctor, I’m an aide, not even a nurse.'
‘Come on, Hannah!’ Nettie poked her gently. ‘He’s not like that, and he does like you. Everybody could see that.’
‘Oh, Nettie, stop!’ They worked silently after that. Everybody could see? Was that why he’d stopped talking to her? One of the nurses must have teased him, or Mrs Moll had said something. She’d be annoyed, maybe even angry. Hannah sniffed. Even thinking about him made her want to cry, and he didn’t deserve it. ‘Can you manage the washing-up after supper?’
‘Sure,’ Nettie said, ‘it’s just bread and marg and apples tonight. I hope we get more food tomorrow morning, or there’ll be bread and marg for lunch too. And we’re almost out of milk. What are you doing tonight? Got a date?’
‘No chance,’ Hannah complained, ‘I’m on night duty from eight on. I’m going to try to sleep now.’
‘What a bore! I haven’t been to my club for weeks either. Last time I was there, some German soldiers came in, and within ten minutes we were all on our way home. Left them sitting all alone over their beers.’
‘Poor things.’
‘Oh, they have friends, don’t worry. Plenty of girls will go out with a soldier for a free drink and a cigarette.’
‘Is that all you have to do? Have a drink?’
‘And smile and laugh at their dumb jokes and tell them how good their Dutch is, which it isn’t. That’s all, if you’re smart.’
‘I’ll remember that, in case I get an invitation.’ They laughed at this, and Nettie threw a towel over to Hannah, they finished drying the trays and bowls, stacked everything neatly and turned off the lights.
Going upstairs to their rooms, they linked arms. How nice it would be to confide in Nettie. Vera never came to Amsterdam, and she had no time to go to Utrecht. After so many months, Nettie was still only somebody she could have a laugh with. She would have been willing to listen if Nettie wanted to really talk, to confide in her. There never seemed to be a right time to start.
Living in the hospital, working half the week at night and sleeping all the next day, she hadn’t seen much of the city. What she had seen was as pretty as Utrecht. There were handsome old buildings along both sides of the canals, buildings so old they tipped a little over the street or leaned sideways against their neighbors. The Germans had taken some of them for their offices. When she walked past, the soldiers standing guard at the front door stared at her, their hands on their gun holsters.
Going along the corridor to the bathroom, she bumped into Hans. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, pulling her robe closer around her, ‘do you live here too?’
‘Oh no, our Mrs Moll wouldn’t put a rooster in her henhouse. I’m just stuffing some papers into the closet over there. Former patients, but they might come back some day.’
‘Have you worked in a hospital before? You don’t mind if I ask? ‘
‘Of course not. Then I can ask too, can’t I?’ He saw her frown and said quickly, ‘I was brought up to believe that it’s impolite to ask
personal questions. You too? Well, here we are, and the only things it’s safe to ask about are personal. Strange, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it depends on what you mean by personal.’
‘Well, for instance, do you have any plans for tomorrow evening? I saw on the schedule board that you’re free.’
‘Oh, you are nosey!’ She took a deep breath. This was going to be all right. ‘I do have plans. I was planning to go out with you. Is that what you were planning?’
‘I was!’ He held the door to the bathroom open and bowed. ‘You could meet some friends of mine, you’ll like them and they’ll like you. Eight o’clock at the Two Swans around the corner, all right?’ She nodded. ‘One more personal question? What’s that accent of yours? I mean, what part of Germany?’
‘Berlin.’
‘Oh hell,’ he said, ‘it’s bad there, isn’t it? Do you have family there?’
‘Not anymore.’ She went past him, turned to smile and shut the door behind her. No more questions. Suppose he asked whether she was Jewish, what should she say? And did she want to meet his friends? People weren’t really interested in her, when they asked questions they hardly listened to the answers. Mrs Moll knew she had come from Berlin, but she didn’t want to know whether Hannah was Jewish or Christian or heathen as long as she did her work.
She had repeated her lies so often, stories about places she hadn’t been and things she hadn’t done, that she almost believed they were the truth. The important thing about answering nosey questions was not to tell more than people asked for. Where are you from was simple, she was from Utrecht, wasn’t she?
Saturday afternoon, while the children napped, she folded and put away baskets of clean clothes and diapers and then sat down to study for next week’s anatomy test. ‘The bones of the skull are arranged in two parts,’ she told herself silently, ‘the cranium consisting of eight bones and the facial skeleton of fourteen.’ There was a drawing circled by arrows and the names of all twenty-two bones in Latin: ‘anterior fossa, middle cranial fossa, postcranial fossa,’ what did ‘fossa’ mean? How was she supposed to remember it if she didn’t know that?
Martin’s face was made of fourteen bones, bones so handsome that you wanted to just sit and look at him. He’d never said he thought she was beautiful, so she knew he didn’t think so. She got up and, dipping her head, looked into the little mirror that hung just high enough for a child to use. Her nose, her nasal septum, she remembered that at least, was short, straight, narrow, not at all a Jewish nose. She had it from Mutti, luckily. Vati’s septum started up between his eyes and curved down to a point that hung over his upper lip, a nose that labeled you a Jew in Berlin.
Martin was handsomer than Hans, but Hans had a smile that made you want to smile back. If she started to like him, meeting him here in the hospital would be the same as meeting Martin had been. Nettie had said, ‘I never see you together any more,’ and she understood why Martin had stopped asking her out. People gossiped, disapproved, were jealous. But the children missed him too, and they couldn’t understood.
The weather had changed, it was raining but there was no wind, and she opened the windows for a while to let fresh air into the ward. The children pulled their blankets up under their chins and lay silently watching the fine rain come down. Sitting near the window, she thought about the evening ahead. She had promised to meet Hans and his friends, and now she wished she hadn’t. She hardly knew him and couldn’t guess what sort of people he went around with. What would the other girls be like? Prettier? Better dressed? There’d be an old girlfriend of his, perhaps, staring at her across the table and wondering why Hans had invited her. And jokes in Dutch she didn’t understand.
She would go up to bed and study for next week’s anatomy test until she fell asleep. Monday she would say she’d been nervous about the test and would only have spoiled his evening. He wouldn’t mind with all his friends there anyway. She sat in the dark, saying yes and no to herself, waiting until all the children were asleep, then she shut the windows and went out to look at the big clock. It was half-past seven, Hans might already be at the bar. Go, she told herself, and raced upstairs to change.
Her one good dress was hanging in front of the open window. The mild February air had smoothed the wrinkles out, and she pulled it over her head and buckled the wide belt. The comb, some of the lipstick that was already worn down almost to the metal, and she was ready.
Downstairs the clock chimed eight. She would be five minutes late, the right time to arrive. Clouds hid the moon and, in the strict blackout, the gas lamps along the street were unlit and thick curtains covered all the windows. She walked close to the buildings, aware of the water that flowed past in the canal a few feet away. Drunken soldiers fell in sometimes or were pushed, and there was never anybody there to save them.
At the corner she turned right and looked for the druggist’s sign that hung out over the street, the head of a black man wearing a turban and sticking his tongue out to take a pill. The Two Swans was just next door. She could hear laughing and someone playing an accordion, music she hated. She could still turn around and go back, but she didn’t want to argue with herself any longer. In the small room where cigarette smoke drifted under the lamps, there were a few tables with thick Persian carpets draped over them and flower vases holding a single orange paper carnation. Since the queen and her family had escaped to England, the carnation had become a secret salute to her husband. Hannah had read somewhere that the prince was a German nobleman and had been a party member while he was studying in Berlin. It wasn't something his royal wife wanted to hear about.
Hans was standing at the bar and turned around when the door closed behind her. When he came toward her, both hands held out to take hers, he shouted, ‘Here you are! I was just getting the beers. Come and meet everyone.’ Around the biggest table in the back were five people, three men leaning forward to talk over the noise and two women whispering to each other and laughing. Everybody looked up when she came over, and the men jumped up and shook her hand. They were Adrian and Bernie and Tommy, one of the girls was Suza or something like that, and the other one didn’t seem to have a name. Smiles all around and the men went back to their argument.
Hans went to the bar and returned with beers for everyone. Lifting his glass, Adrian said, ‘To the men!’ and they all repeated it. Hannah must have looked puzzled, because Suza saw it and explained, ‘He means the men on strike. It’s the start of a revolution, he says. Isn’t that exciting?’
‘Suza, you fool,’ Bernie said, ‘there’s nothing exciting about a revolution. You make it sound like entertainment!’
‘I do not!’
‘All right you two.’ Adrian said. ‘The strike’s spreading all over the country, and we’ve got the Germans off-balance. Now we’ve got to steal as many weapons as we can get our hands on. It’s a waste of lives otherwise.’
Hannah leaned closer to Hans. ‘Who’s on strike exactly?’ she whispered. ‘Mrs Moll said trams, is that right?’ Mrs Moll didn’t allow any newspapers in the hospital. She said it made the patients nervous, and that didn’t help them get better.
Hans angled his chair closer to hers and put his mouth close to her ear. ‘That music! Can you hear me?’ She nodded. ‘Did you hear about the fight at the Alcazar last week? No? It’s a nightclub where Jewish people are allowed to go. Some NSBers and German soldiers smashed the windows one night and then wrecked the whole place. The Dutch police somehow didn’t manage to show up, so they went off and started breaking into houses and wrecking them too.’
‘Nobody tried to stop them?’
Hearing her, Bernie leaned across the table and said, ‘Everybody tried, it was amazing! There were men from all over the city turning up to fight.’
‘And somebody got killed, of course,’ Adrian added. ‘One of the Dutch thugs got his face smashed in, there was blood everywhere and, when some of our guys tried to get away, they ran straight into the arms of the German police!’
<
br /> ‘Then they started pulling Jewish men out of their houses,’ Bernie said. ‘People who had nothing to do with the fight.’
Half-listening, Hannah was watching Adrian. He wasn’t handsome. His head was too small for his wide shoulders and his ears stuck out too much. But his eyes bored into you, intense blue and white and rimmed with thick lashes like a girl’s. His voice, not loud but certain, dominated the discussion and, when he laughed, everyone joined in.
Hans touched her arm, and she turned to look at him. ‘That’s why the strike started,’ he explained. ‘The longshoremen first and then the tram conductors and then, when people saw the trams had stopped running and realized it was a strike, everybody joined it, people who worked in shops and schools and factories.’
‘We’re not going to let the Germans arrest any more Jews,’ Bernie added. ‘We’re supposed to think they’re in camps in Holland, but we know they end up in prison.’
‘What will they do if people don’t go to work?’ she asked.
Before Hans could answer, Adrian said, ‘Whatever they do, they can’t stop us once we unite!’
‘The problem is your people planned the strike, but it’s other people whose blood will flow, and you know it, Adrian,’ Tommy said.
‘That’s a rotten thing to say! Do you think we’re sitting behind our desks somewhere, pushing papers while our comrades get killed?’
Tommy protested, ‘I didn’t say that. Don’t be so prickly! You radicals are brave enough, but you know I’m right. When they get finished breaking the strike, they’ll round up hundreds of Jewish men who have never punched a Nazi. And every time one of their bastards gets hurt, more! If you ask me, this strike’s worse than useless. It’s causing exactly what you wanted to prevent.’
‘We’ll see how useless it is before we decide that. This will get too big for them!’
‘How big can it get? We haven’t got enough guns, we have no bombs, most of our police are against us. It’s heroic and it’s doomed! Does that really appeal to you?’ Adrian shrugged, and Tommy raised his eyebrows at him, both agreeing to disagree.
The Time Between Page 8