“Good, I believe that. But you live out in the country, an ideal place for those who prefer not to associate much with other people, isn’t that so?”
“That’s possible, but I can’t help that I happen to live there.”
“You’re playing dumb. I will accept that you have little to do with anything anymore. I can understand that, considering your past. But I cannot believe that nobody has ever come to you with certain requests. Or am I wrong.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You understand me all right, but I’ll say it in so many words. If I needed a place to hide, I’d come to you.”
“I want nothing to do with that.”
“Agreed, but did no one ever come to ask?”
“They know me. They know how I feel about that. And they’re all a bunch of pious fanatics around there who don’t even trust me.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“Like I said, they know what kind of person I am. They don’t come to me. It wouldn’t work, either. We have a small house with only one room. Where would we put them.”
The man held up a report. “It says here that they counted four beds this morning in that small house of yours. Isn’t that excessive?”
“I already explained that this morning when policeman Bolhuis asked about it. In the summertime I often sleep in the back of the house because it’s not as stuffy there as in the cupboard bed, and the bed in the attic is the boy’s.”
He said that intentionally, and he waited to see if the man would start talking about Germ.
“You’ve also been to Germany, right? We were going to get back to that. Was that for a long stay?”
“Never longer than six, seven months at a time, and a whole bunch of us would go”
“You made good money there, isn’t that so?”
“We were able to save some money there.”
“Did you work for a farmer?”
“No, we didn’t care for farmwork. And I didn’t know how to milk. I spent some time in the mines, but most of the time we worked on the railroad and road building. They were putting in a lot of new tracks and roads at that time.”
“What did you think of Germany?”
“There was more work there and the people were better off there than we were here, at least at that time. But there was also a time that the Germans came here to help with the mowing and the haying and so on, you must know that too.”
“Sure, but that was a different time. When you were there, national-socialism was on the rise and that helped you get work. You had Hitler to thank for being able to save some money there.”
“It’s true that something was going on there, but we didn’t have much to do with that. We had our own group and we were there to work.”
“Did you never think about staying in Germany?”
“We had our home in Beets and that’s where we wanted to be. I’m not sure why.”
“Some did stay there, though.”
“Not from our area, but I did hear about some. That was later; I haven’t been back there since 1937.”
“Those people were a lot better off. I talked to a lot of Frisians in Recklinghaus who were happy to be there. They know the difference between old and new times, and that’s why they also know now which side to be on. Right now much is demanded from those people. The men are on the front line, the women in the factories. Here we hardly do anything. Germany is doing everything for us. I’m not asking you to do anything either. All I need from you is some information. It makes no difference to us if you say nothing, we’ll find out everything anyway. It’s only a small detail to arrest several hundred people. There are always some among them who start talking right away. But we’d rather not do that. The innocent often become the victims and it creates a lot of commotion. I believe that you’re a good man. And I know very well how the common people think about this; they’re willing, but they don’t dare. They’re being terrorized by a small group of people who realize that their time is past, but they want to resist to the end because they have everything to lose. I had thought that you had more courage. And I still believe that. You are no coward; these reports make that clear enough. You have always dared to stand up for your convictions.”
He lay the brown folder on his desk. He took a cigarette and lit it. He waited, but there was no response. Then he said with a sigh: “Well, we’ll just leave it at this, then.”
The German soldier got the signal and came forward.
He pulled himself up out of his chair and hesitated for a moment. He said: “This is a mistake. I have nothing to say. I have no part in it and I want to have nothing to do with it. That’s not forbidden, is it? I have my fishing and right now I’m making a pretty good living with that. I don’t need to get involved in anything else. Why do I have to be implicated in this? I don’t even want to know about it, it’s none of my business. Why should I give a damn what they’re up to on the lake during the night. Just so they leave my fish traps alone.”
He took a step toward the man. “And if you want to tell me that nowadays they no longer deliver a common worker into the hands of the big shots, then tell me how it’s possible for me to be picked up just like that? They used to tell me right away what they wanted me for, but you don’t even do that. You treat people whichever way you want. I have nothing to do with the whole rotten business and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stay here any longer.”
The soldier grabbed his shoulder.
When he walked through the corridor, his shaking stopped. He wiped his sweaty hands on his pants and let himself be locked up.
7. The Cigarette Box
“How did it go?” asked the other.
He stood under the light with his hands on his back and looked him up and down.
“All right.”
He lay down on the bunk.
“What do you mean, all right?”
“Or not all right, I don’t know exactly.”
“I was called back again too.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“How would you know?”
“They gave you something to smoke.”
“Damn.”
He put his hand in front of his mouth. “You smelled that, of course. I could smoke as much as I wanted. I smoked four cigarettes in a row, enough to make me sick, but now I’ve had my fill of them for a while. They were pretty decent. Some of them are scoundrels of course, but there are a couple you can really talk to. You shouldn’t be too hard on those people, of course. After all, they got their orders too and let me tell you, far from home in a foreign land and among people that would like to see them dead. That ain’t easy. It shouldn’t surprise us that they sometimes go too far. And …”
“What was the message?” he asked.
“What they said to me? Well …”
“No, what you have to say to me.”
“Oh, well, yeah, they did talk about that. You were on to that this morning already. I didn’t tell them everything. I’m in a bad fix, just as bad as you are, and it’s worth a good deal to me if I can get outta here. I’ve got a family with three young kids. I can …”
He grabbed his stomach and doubled up. “There it is again, a cramp in my guts.” He ran to the barrel and pulled his pants down. As he sat down, he groaned: “This can’t go on, the whole business is plugged up. I’m gonna have to ask for a doctor.”
His talking turned into moaning.
He saw that the man’s pain was real. He said: “Now that you’ve smoked, maybe it’ll come. When I smoked my first pipe as a boy, I had to go like a cow full of spring grass afterward.”
The man grunted some more but said that nothing was coming.
He lay down on his back and stared into the ventilator shaft. He was gradually beginning to relax again. But he was very tired. I can’t take it as well as I used to, he thought.
When he was first married, he often thought about it, sometimes every day. After the discussion about Germ and Bare
ld with the man in the fancy room it came back now: the feeling of regret that he hadn’t gone to America. Germ had very much wanted him to because he really didn’t dare go alone.
I should’ve done it, I should’ve done it. There were times he had thought that more than once every day. Everybody seemed to be going. Guys of seventeen, eighteen years old went across and reported that they were making money to burn.
He could’ve afforded it. The trip at that time cost eighty guilders and he’d sometimes come back from Germany with that much money. At one time they had spent a whole summer in peat work without striking once, and he could have gone after that summer.
After he got stuck with Gryt he still had it in his head. If it hadn’t been for the boy, he would have gone through with it. There would’ve been somebody else to go along. He got along well with Jaap Dykstra and together they would’ve made out fine.
“You don’t have to stay here for my sake,” said the old man. “If I was ten years younger, I’d still try it myself.”
“What prevents you?” said Hindrik. “You’re still in good shape and they can use ornery types like you in America.”
Hindrik did not want to go to America for all the gold in the world. When they worked in Germany he got as homesick as a cat. He didn’t go as often as the others, either. They were able to make it at home. “My old lady can get along on a shoestring,” he used to say.
“It won’t come,” sighed the other man as he put the lid back on the barrel.
“The cramp’s over for right now, but it’ll come back, of course.”
Bent over, he stumbled to the bench and sat down.
He didn’t like the man, right from the start he hadn’t, but he could see that the man had a bad case. In a few minutes the man doubled over from a new attack.
“Sit down on your knees and then let yourself sag down so that you’re squeezing your stomach, that will help.”
The man looked at him funny. “Is that s’posed to be a joke?”
“No, just try it. As kids when our bellies were empty, we would do it too. You’re pinching your guts together that way, and that gives relief.”
“But my trouble ain’t from hunger, but because I’m all plugged up.”
“That makes no difference. It works great for a gut-ache too. It’ll make you go pretty soon. A little bit of peppermint oil would work even better. If we could afford it, Mom would often have some of it in the house and then we would get half a teaspoonful. She had it in her apron pocket when we worked in the peat together. As boys we’d be treading around in the scoop and Mom would wheelbarrow the first squares into a pile. In the fall we’d have a constant cold, and then we needed her. But when she wasn’t there, we’d sag through the knees and squeeze our bowels.”
The man knelt on the floor and tried it.
“Make ’em pinch,” he said, and he turned on his side to watch how the man did it.
After a while, the man grunted: “I’ll be damned, I think it’s working.”
“Just stay sitting that way. According to my mom, you shouldn’t do it for more than fifteen minutes, otherwise you’re going to have trouble. But I don’t know anymore what kind of trouble. She had a lot of those cures that cost nothing.”
He suddenly remembered that he had talked about America with the girl. The subject came up when she said that in 1939 her dad wanted to emigrate, preferably to America, because they had relatives there. Dad was afraid that the Netherlands would not be able to stay neutral in the world war that was sure to come.
“He should’ve done it,” she said.
“I should’ve done it too,” he said.
Together they were checking up on the fish traps. It was an outing for her and she could lend a hand when necessary. He had a fish trap in hand that in all probability had had a visit from an otter, judging by the hole. He explained to her what such an animal looked like. He had put the boat on the leeward side of a clump of bulrushes and was knitting the holes in the trap. While watching his skill, she told him about her family. “We should’ve gone to America.”
He told her then that more than once he had been ready to take off.
“And it would’ve been easy to do. I’ve got two brothers there and one would’ve been willing to help us. I’ve often been sorry that I didn’t go through with it.”
“Did they do well in America, those brothers of yours?”
“I think so, at least they never came back.”
“You mean they never wrote about it?” the girl wanted to know.
“We never went to school much, and we didn’t keep it up either, so letter writing doesn’t come so easy. But Germ often sent a picture postcard with a few words that he was doing fine.”
“And the other brother?”
“We never heard from him again; he didn’t get along with Dad.”
“Did he run away or something?”
“No, we didn’t have trouble, but the morning he left he gave Dad a good beating.”
He went on to tell her how Bareld had put his knapsack down, walked over to the old man and said to him: “And now you’re going to get what you’ve got coming, because you let our mom die, you old skunk.”
And that was true. Dad was rough on himself and even rougher on Mom and the kids. The big boys could take it, but mom couldn’t. Bareld said that he had let her die. He rammed Dad in the chest and punched him in the stomach three times, and then he flung him into the canal. Bareld put his knapsack on his back and that’s how he left.
The girl looked at him and asked cautiously: “Was your dad so terrible then, or was your brother …”
“Bareld was not a bad fella. He is older than me and so he lived longer with Mom. According to Hindrik, he was crazy about her.”
“And what did your dad do then?”
“Nothing. He’d pretty much had his fill of it, I think. We hauled him out of the water or he would’ve drowned because he couldn’t swim. He did stand there for quite a while looking after Bareld, but Bareld never looked back.”
It was almost too much for her, he noticed.
“What did he say about your dad again?”
“He said that he had let our mom die. Mom was sick a long time, I still remember that. Our boat lay in a stream then by the Prikroad. It was mostly water then and there were almost no houses. We lived on a small flat barge on which Dad had built a cabin. I don’t know what was ailing Mom, nobody paid too much attention to that, but it was likely consumption, there was a lot of that going around. We didn’t get much to eat of course, and Mom even less, the kids came first. And the food wasn’t the right kind. Mom needed eggs and milk and so on.”
“And wasn’t that available?”
“It was available all right, but we couldn’t afford it. Maybe Mom could’ve gotten help, but then Dad would’ve had to go to relief for the poor in Beetsterzwaag. They would give handouts sometimes, not much of course, and usually no eggs or other expensive foods. And for Dad that would’ve been a hard trip to make.”
“Why?”
“Dad didn’t want to hold out his hand, he was too proud for that. He was sorta extreme and his reputation wasn’t the best, so I don’t know if they would’ve helped him. He was a fanatical Domela-man. Domela Nieuwenhuis was his man, whatever he said was the law for him. Domela was the leader of the anarchists and the gentlemen in Beets were not fond of those.”
“He never tried to get help for your mom?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But if your mom was so terribly sick …”
“Maybe he didn’t even realize that himself. They probably didn’t even have a doctor out to see her. And Mom never complained.”
The girl got on his nerves a bit with all those questions.
“But would you do it if your wife was terribly sick?”
He said that he didn’t know.
“Germ never tells me anything about Beets and so on,” said the girl.
“Germ doesn’t know that much! He was stil
l a boy when we left there.”
“But you don’t tell him anything, either. Why not?”
“He’s never asked about it, I guess.”
At another time she had remarked that Germ and he said so little to each other and that he and Gryt would be silent for a whole evening.
“And you tell me a whole lot.”
He replied that talking to strangers seemed to come a bit easier.
“Should that be about enough?” asked the other man. “The pain is mostly gone.”
“Why don’t you try it.”
“If I could get rid of something now …”
The man got up and grunted. “I don’t even have to try it.”
He went back to lie down on the bunk.
“Lay on your back and pull your knees up, up to your shoulders if you can, then it won’t come back, maybe.”
“How do you know all about these things?”
“As I said, at home we had to take care of ourselves, and what Mom taught us then we still profit from. We never had a doctor out to our place.”
“You mentioned something about my message a while ago.”
He waited. “I said, you wanted to know a while ago what message I had.”
“I heard you.”
There was a short silence. “They want me to pump you and then report it to them. If that works, they’ll let me go.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I told them I was willing, but that there was no use trying to put anything over on you. Just after you left for your interrogation, I had to appear before the other man to give a report of what you had said. I tried to give them something, but those guys are sharp, I tell ya. They caught on right away that I’d found out nothing. So now you know how things stand.”
He heard the squeaking of the bunk under him. The man tossed and turned and passed gas. “Well, at least that one’s out.”
Then came the sound of soldier boots down the hallway, but they went past.
The man said: “And then they started to threaten. They said that I had to try again or it would turn out bad for me.”
The Trap Page 7