“But they did let you smoke cigarettes.”
“That was later, after I explained it to them.”
“What did you explain to them?”
“That you weren’t born yesterday, so to speak. Well, what are you gonna do. I’m up a creek and that’s why I’m telling them straight out what the lay of the land is. I want to get the hell outta here. I’ll go stir-crazy here before long.”
“You’ll get over that, of course.”
“Not me, I’ll go outta my mind if I stay here any longer.”
“The first few weeks are the worst, that’s true.”
“This is no prison, this is a transit house. The people who refuse to cooperate end up here. Did you see that long corridor right around the corner here? They have rooms there for the big-timers who refuse to confess. During the night I sometimes suddenly hear somebody scream and then soldiers start running through the hall. That kinda thing always seems to be done during the night.”
“Is that where you were questioned?”
“No, but that’s what I’m scared of.”
“So, you haven’t confessed yet.”
“I don’t have anything to confess, that’s the problem. I’ve told them everything I know, but that’s not enough. There are a lot of people in the underground in Sneek, they said, and they thought I would be able to tell them more about that. But I know nothing. I’m a dealer and I want nothing to do with the underground. But they don’t believe that.”
“Yeah, that’s the way it usually is.”
“It’s the honest truth; they think I’m mixed up in all kindsa stuff, but all I did was a little dealing. I bought a bunch of ration cards, but if I’d known they were taken from a distribution center by the underground, I wouldn’t’ve touched them, of course. But how was I to know? I made the deal with the man in the alley next to the cafe by the public market. I can’t even tell you what he looked like because it was almost dark. That’s all, but they don’t believe me. I told them. I said: Do you think those people of the underground are crazy? They’re not about to throw in their name and address, you know. Detectives should certainly be able to understand that!”
“And now they just let you sit here.”
“The first few days I had to do nothing but try to identify people they had arrested, but I didn’t know any of ’em. But that gradually got less, and I started to hope that I would get off with that.”
“Maybe they’re still after some others they want to show you, and that’s why they’re still keeping you.”
“I don’t know, I’m all mixed up. I wish there was more I could tell those guys. If I only knew as much as you do.”
“I know even less. I’ve never bought ration cards. I sell fish and I know exactly where they come from, because I take them out of the lake myself.”
“They seem pretty sure, though, that you know a lot more.”
“I get the same feeling.”
The man below him sat up and held up his hand as if to seal an agreement by handsmacking. “I want to make a deal with you. Nobody’s gonna find out, the Germans don’t have to know about it. I’m gonna tell them that you made a slip of the tongue. I’ll give you ten thousand guilders to boot. I’ve got a nice bunch of sheep in the fields on the other side of Sneek. We’ll go there together and then we’ll close the deal. My hand on it, and it stays between us. It’s in the interest of both of us, right? You don’t have to tell the Germans everything. If they just have a lead, they’ll take care of the rest. You’ve gotta think about your family, nobody else will. And you don’t have to do a thing yourself.”
The man held up his hand again and looked at him with eager eyes.
He said: “This is a rotten business. You know a lot more about the underground than I do.”
Then the man began to sob nervously and suddenly dashed to the barrel with his hands clutched to his stomach. Halfway there he dropped to his knees and squeezed his belly.
“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, and you too, goddamn you, we’re both gonna die. Tell them something, man. Why should we give a damn about the people.”
He kept whining and wailing while pinching his gut more and more and swaying his rear end back and forth.
He was still lying down when a soldier entered, looked at him, and told him to get up. The man had not noticed him and jumped up. But he immediately folded double again with his hands on his stomach, and he hollered that the pain was killing him. The soldier ignored him, stepped to the bunk and said: “Come along.”
He put on his jacket and followed the soldier.
They went back to the fancy room and the soldier stopped on the doormat. The sun just touched the top of the houses on the other side. The blinds had been pulled up, and he saw people behind the windows.
“Your last chance,” said the man, businesslike.
He was not offered a seat.
“I don’t think you understand what that means. If we don’t come to an agreement this time around, I won’t be able to do anything for you anymore.”
He looked at him and continued: “Now we’re going to do it without the embellishments of this morning. I’ve tried to be decent with you, I’ve given you every opportunity, isn’t that so?”
“I s’pose so,” he said.
“I will now give you straightforward questions and I expect straightforward answers. Let’s have that clearly understood. This is the first question: You have no contacts with the underground?”
“No, I said that already and …”
“Stop; I said without embellishments. How did your son join the underground?”
He felt the old anxiety creep up on him again. He said slowly: “I don’t know if he joined. I don’t believe so.”
“He joined, all right. He just turned twenty-one, he’s of age. But can he do all of that without your knowledge?”
“If you say that he did join, then that happened without my knowledge.”
“Where was he last night?”
“That I don’t know, he was not at home.”
“You just let him run. You have no authority over him. That boy can do whatever he wants.”
“From early on we’ve had to learn to take care of ourselves.”
“That’s how you were raised, and that’s the way it is with your son, too.”
“That’s always been our way.”
“He should have been in Germany. He was called up, but you wouldn’t know about that either, of course.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“But it’s true. I had somebody look it up. He was called up for Germany.”
“It’s not our way to let ourselves be ordered.”
The man suddenly jerked a drawer open and put a few things on top of the desk: a well-worn tobacco case, a pocketknife, and a tin cigarette lighter.
He saw it at once. He didn’t even have to see it from closer up, yet he took a step forward and stared at the tobacco case, the F. Herder, and the lighter that the boy often fussed around with because it worked so poorly.
He felt himself get sick, a feeling he had not had before, and that was much worse than the shaking and the sweating.
The man behind the desk was silent.
He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything. He would have liked to sit down now, even in that low chair if necessary, because his legs were shaking.
The man said: “We always have more than one trick up our sleeve.”
The trembling did not subside, and the sick feeling in his stomach didn’t either.
At last he said: “You’ve got him.”
The man answered: “We’ve got him.”
8. Bananas
What he had said to the girl last spring, when they had checked on the fish traps together, was not altogether true. He had made that journey to the relief office. Gryt had urged him to do it for the first time when she was pregnant.
They were in a little houseboat by the Swyns Road then. He had bought it in Oudeboorn.
It was a ramshackle little boat that would hardly move anymore. They had a hard time getting it through Boorn to the Beetster canal. Hindrik pulled the towline, and he himself bailed water all the way. By the Swyns Road the boat almost sank right from underneath them. When they saw an inlet they quickly pulled the boat into it. Then they shoveled a few wheelbarrows full of peat soil and threw that and a bunch of branches under it, and then they secured the four corners to posts so the boat couldn’t sink any deeper. And that’s how they happened to get stuck by the Swyns Road.
He didn’t have a penny when they got married. Gryt had a job at a bakery in Tynje but was fired as soon as they found out she was pregnant. They didn’t want her at home because there were already too many mouths to feed. So he had to take her home to his family. Since Mom’s death there had not been a woman in the house. It was a mess of a place that got the best of Gryt in a hurry. Not worth a dime as a cook, his dad pronounced, you bought yourself a pig in a poke—while Gryt was sitting right there.
When she was four or five months along, Gryt had to stay in bed. He was without work just like other men in Beets, but with Hindrik and Dad as partners they managed to get along. Twice that winter they poached a deer in the Zwargiter woods, and with a couple of old trammel nets they hauled bucketfuls of fish out of the peat canals by the Stobbehoeke.
Gryt wanted to see a doctor because she was gradually getting worse, she said. Hindrik and Dad were of the opinion that it was a waste of money, and Hindrik’s wife Geeske added that it was all in her head. Gryt was a whiner and a complainer, they said.
Still, he did take her in to Boom, pulling her on a sleigh. He dressed her warmly and took Geeske along. They didn’t get much help from the doctor, but he didn’t charge much either.
Four weeks later came that ruckus with the forest ranger that got him the fourteen months sentence. They picked him up just before the work started, and when he got out of Crackstate the work was about to start again. The boy had come in the meantime, a sickly little kid, according to Dad and Hindrik. Gryt had visited him once at Crackstate with the little boy who cried constantly and had started to scream when he saw his dad. Don’t bring him along again, he ordered Gryt.
Germ was closest to him, and so they had agreed to name the boy after Germ. Dad didn’t object. There were two Lykles in the family already, and since neither one amounted to anything, there was no sense in adding any more.
After he was released from the house of correction, they worked for only about three weeks. Then a strike was called because the peat bosses wanted to reduce their pay. He couldn’t really afford to be without income. Gryt wasn’t able to nurse, the baby had to have sweet milk, and so forth. First he made a trip to Gryt’s parents in Boornbergum, but they could barely take care of themselves. For the boy’s sake he had gone to the relief office in Beetsterzwaag. He didn’t tell his dad and the others about it. From the relief office he got a note that he could take to the store in Beets for some baby food, and twice a week he could get a liter of milk from a farmer in Oudbeets.
A bit later he worked now and then at some odd jobs: loading a boat in Gorredijk and unloading railcars. The pay was poor, but to earn more he’d have to go to the clay region in Groningen, and he didn’t want to be that far from his boy.
For a while he had been all set to take a steady job as a farmworker in Boorn. That didn’t look so bad. He didn’t have to milk, and it came with a one-room brick house, including a rainwater cistern and pump. Gryt had been very excited about that. The boat was damp and moldy and very bad, especially for the boy.
But when Dad heard about it, he had been spittin’ mad. And Hindrik had said: “Did you lose your marbles? One of us working for a farmer, how crazy can you get! If you don’t dare do it yourself, I’ll tell Gryt what’s what.”
He said: “I’m not doing it for Gryt’s sake, but because of the boy.”
Nevertheless, he did not take that job, and before he told Gryt, he had more drinks in a tavern by the bridge than he could handle, so then she didn’t dare give him a hard time, for drinking always put him in an ugly mood.
And yet they pulled the boy through.
“It’s the bananas,” said Gryt.
Every week he went to Gorredijk to buy a kilo of bananas, and the boy would get a couple of those a day. Gryt mashed the bananas in sweet milk and when she didn’t have the milk, she’d chew the bananas herself first to make it easier for the boy to swallow. She had the money in a cup in the back of a cupboard, and when they had company the bananas would be hidden in the storage space under the bed. It was clearly understood that no one was to see the bananas. And the money he had received for the sheep was not supposed to be used for anything else.
Later he had taken another sheep from the same farmer’s field and sold it to the same man in the Honnesteech in Drachten. He didn’t get what the sheep was worth, and it was a dangerous undertaking, but that’s how they managed to pull the boy through. When he was five years old, one could hardly tell anymore that he’d had a bad start.
“Pretty good,” said Hindrik, when he saw the boy, and in Geeske’s opinion it was nothing less than a miracle.
“He’s got to be better off than us in the future,” Gryt said to him, and that became the next goal.
It was for the boy’s sake that he took that job as supervisor on the polder.
Dad had shown him the door. He said: “I’m done with you. I want no slavedriver walking the floor of my house.”
Hindrik too wanted to have nothing to do with him.
But it was all for the boy’s sake.
And when he fired that lazy pig with the big mouth, Harm Dam, at the insistence of the chairman, that was all for the boy’s sake too. And for no other reason.
9. The Cigarette Lighter
The man in the fancy room said: “What do you think, shall we try one more time?”
He looked first at the large desk where he saw a few things that had come from his boy’s pocket. He said: “What have you done with him?”
“We’ve done nothing with him.”
The man stood up. “We wanted to hear your story first, and if that’s satisfactory …”
“Didn’t he say anything?”
It wasn’t his custom to interrupt.
The man said: “We haven’t asked him anything yet.”
“Why not?”
“He’s young. We’d rather talk with people who have more of a sense of responsibility. Such young fellows don’t even know what it’s all about, so we protect them as long as possible.”
Fear took hold of him again. Something’s wrong, they’re trying to trap me, he thought to himself. But he said: “I must talk to him first.”
“That’s odd. You’ve always let him be, and now all of a sudden you need to talk to him.”
“That’s just it. He goes his own way, he doesn’t tell me anything. That’s why I have to ask him first and then I’ll let you know.”
“I can’t allow that.”
“Why not?”
The man came out from behind his desk and started pacing the floor. He laughed softly and said: “I’ve never experienced anything this crazy. You’re reversing the roles, you’re interrogating me.”
He stopped and folded his hands behind his back. “But I can take it from you, isn’t that something? I have a weakness for you, that must be it. Just the same, I’m in charge here and I can’t allow two suspects to confer together on what their explanation is going to be; that would certainly be unique in investigative practice.”
The man had to laugh about it himself.
“But if he was with the others, at that incident last night …”
“He was with them. Otherwise we wouldn’t have caught him, right?”
“I don’t know about that. It happened on the lake, I understand, and he often pokes around there. He’s fishing on my license, and at this time of year he often poaches. That’s not legal, of course, but …”
“Our people do not pick
up people for poaching. When we pick up people, it’s for other reasons.”
“He could’ve just happened to roam around there.”
“You know better.”
“No, I don’t, and that’s why I need to talk to him.”
“He was caught with the weapons in his hands.”
He tried to imagine it, but since he had seen that tobacco case and the other things, he felt a bit confused. He said: “It looks strange to me.”
Then he remembered something. “We have an old shotgun, it was my dad’s, and he sometimes takes off with that. We don’t have a permit for it, but …”
“It wasn’t a shotgun but an English stengun, an automatic pistol.”
He knew at once that the man was trying to pull a fast one on him. “I wouldn’t know what the boy would want a thing like that for. You can’t shoot game with something like that, I know that much. What do you want to do with that kind of gun on the lake?”
“You tell me.”
He was going to lose this one, so he didn’t say any more.
“Your son and several of his cohorts were caught red-handed with the weapons.”
“He’s not that dumb. Did they shoot with them?”
“They resisted arrest.”
He couldn’t believe it. He was sure the man was still trying to trick him. “You always lose when you do that.”
“You’re right about that.”
“It’s impossible.”
He tried to dismiss it, but he was afraid that it was possible. “I did see the water police this spring mess around with containers that had been dropped from airplanes during the night. At least that’s what they said.”
“Exactly, and those containers had weapons in them, which you know very well.”
“I didn’t know that, but the police did search my boat.”
“And never found anything, of course.”
“What would I do with that junk. If I had found some, I would’ve left them there. Now if it was a good trap …”
He got himself pretty well under control again. He didn’t know what had happened, but he had a notion that it was different from what the man tried to tell him.
“My boy is not so crazy that he would take on the police and the Germans over a couple of containers full of weapons.”
The Trap Page 8