“I’m not interested in it.”
“That we will have to see,” said the man.
He signaled to the soldiers; he himself went out.
The soldiers began to beat him, not hard, but in sensitive areas. It was only for a short while and then the man came back. He said: “This is just a taste. What do you say now?”
He sat straight up in the chair and said nothing.
“Answer me!” yelled the man.
He was tired of all the talk, and when he spoke it was more for himself than for the others. He said: “So often I’ve had to do things against my will, now I’m going to quit. It’s not necessary anymore.”
He was dense, that man. He kept on asking and became increasingly angry. He kept leaving and then the soldiers would start beating him again. At first he deflected the beatings with his hands and arms, but he fell off the chair, and when he lay on the floor they kicked him. But the beatings never lasted long, and it was clear that the soldiers held back.
The man returned and said: “This is just the beginning. You will now get another fifteen minutes and then it’s going to get more serious.”
The soldiers took him back to his cell.
11. That’s What I Had Always Wanted
It became increasingly apparent to him how things really stood. In fact, he marveled how clear it all was to him now.
I never really wanted to, he thought, I’ve done everything against my will, my whole life long. It started with Gryt, and it never stopped until this morning, this afternoon.
That’s the way it was, and he had always thought it couldn’t be any other way. In the first place, he couldn’t abandon Gryt. He who dances must pay the piper, was Dad’s saying, and that’s what everybody did who got a girl in trouble. It was the right thing to do.
He felt sorry for Gryt. She’d been just as crazy about the boy as he. She must be having a very hard time right now.
If I could be with her now, would that be of help to her? he asked himself. He knew the answer. He wouldn’t even dare put a hand on her shoulder. He hoped that she would be well taken care of.
They shouldn’t have had the boy. If he had died as a baby, they wouldn’t miss him anymore now and it would have changed things in so many ways for them. He could’ve gone to America without bowing to anybody. That he had to take a shot at the forest ranger for the boy’s sake wasn’t so bad. The trip to the relief office in Beets was much harder. He hated himself when he went to the store with that note to get baby food. And when he waited for the liter of milk at the farmer’s in Aldbeets, his body ached from annoyance.
The old man simply rejected a handout and let Mom die. And Bareld had given him a beating for that when he left for America.
The girl had not really understood when he told her that story.
“I think that’s terrible,” she said, “to beat up your dad just like that.”
“Not just like that; according to him, Dad had it coming.”
“Why did he have to do it on the day he left for America?”
“Well, that was his last chance. He must’ve suppressed it, you know. He kept it inside, but he wanted to let Dad know that he’d done wrong.”
“Why didn’t you talk about it?”
“At our place such things were never talked about.”
“Was your dad really so bad?”
“Dad was proud, he always had to be right, and if you disagreed with him he’d get mad.”
“And then he’d hit you.”
“Yeah, then he’d beat us. But when we got bigger we’d stand up to him.”
“Did you hit him too before you left home?”
“No, I didn’t want to do that. Dad was a proud man, he didn’t know how to be different. And he was a free socialist, he was very high on that. When Domela Nieuwenhuis came for a talk and anyone should so much as point at the man, Dad would have conniptions. They never bothered Domela when he came to our area. But I’ll bet you Dad would’ve taken care of any policeman who’d give Domela a hard time. That would’ve been worth ten years in the slammer to him. Dad wasn’t sensible. And that kind will forget their family at such times, they lose all sense of responsibility. And that’s not right.”
The girl was thinking. “I believe you do admire your Dad a bit for that.”
“Not at all. Dad was not a good man, everybody knows that in Beets.”
Then the girl wanted to know how they happened to leave Beets.
“Did you have trouble?” she asked.
Because Germ had told her that real Beetsters would never leave except if they’d had trouble, like Germ and Bareld.
What would a boy like Germ know about that? He said something to the effect that they weren’t exactly a close family, and that was true. He would’ve liked to tell her that it was because of Harm Dam, the one he had to fire, but he didn’t get to that.
It was when he was supervisor on the polder. Harm Dam was a lousy worker. Always a big mouth and letting others do all the work. Some said he was absolutely right in firing Harm. But it wasn’t his idea. He had noticed that with the dredging of the underground canal, Koene Vaartjes hauled twice as much mud as did Harm Dam, while Harm was in twice as good a physical condition. Koene worked his tail off, but he wanted another partner because now they couldn’t nearly manage to make their cubic meter quota. And that was all because of Harm, who was forever stopping to refill his pipe.
“If you don’t do it, then I’ll have to do it next week,” the company chairman said. Later Gryt said the same thing, and she was right. Workers like Harm Dam were worthless and you couldn’t defend them.
That’s what he said to Dad and Hindrik too, but they never set foot in his house again.
He stared into the air vent, which didn’t let much light in anymore.
He said aloud: “They were right, of course, Dad and Hindrik. What’s the difference how many cubic meters of mud you load onto the boat in a day. It’s about something else altogether.”
“What are you talking about,” said the other man. He was pacing the cell, all bent over. Now and again he lifted the right leg and let a fart and then kept pacing.
He said; “I’d like you not to talk.”
For there were still many things for him to ponder.
It had all been for the boy’s sake. Gryt and he had come to a firm agreement that the boy must have a better life than they had. That’s why he had let himself get talked into taking that job in the polder. Not a high but a steady income, and that was worth a lot. Gryt would be able to save some, and if the boy might have some plans someday, they’d be able to help him out and get started.
“He should get a good education,” said Gryt. “Maybe we can send him to high school.”
“We shouldn’t reach too high. A trade school would be good enough.”
That was fine with Gryt. Carpentry should make a good living, she thought.
“You have to have some stability,” said the man in Beets. “That wandering from one thing to another doesn’t suit you either. You’re able to do better.”
He knew very well what was behind that talk, and Hindrik said it in so many words: “There, now they got rid of you.”
They hadn’t offered that kind of job to Hindrik. He did make a lot of noise, but they didn’t have as much trouble with Hindrik as they had with him. He didn’t give in as quickly as the others.
At that meeting at Three Corners in Lippenhuizen, he was the first to get hit because he was the one to go after the police all by himself. When they went on strike, his houseboat was watched and they took his old bike so that he couldn’t go to Jobbega to get the workers to strike there. Twice he had been in charge of roll call and in Beets had been the spokesman more than once when a group of them held a demonstration in city hall.
Gryt said he was his own worst enemy. He caused all the trouble, he got the most beatings, and when it was all over, he was locked out while the others could go back to work. Gryt was right.
He
fired Harm Dam, but he told the chairman of the company the next day that he wanted to quit. That had made Gryt furious too, and she was right again. Four weeks without work and absolute poverty because he refused to go to Hindrik or to Dad for help. And finally the little shack on the lake and still more poverty. Until the autumn of ’39 when he got the knack of it and began to catch a lot more fish.
“All for the boy’s sake,” he said, “and I never really wanted to. This is peculiar, but I know exactly now what I did want.”
First, though, he had to straighten out a few more things in his mind. That incident in Germany, for example. They must’ve been working on the railroad at the time because every week they’d be somewhere else. It had been Douwe Krist’s idea. He had found himself a girl and said that this was his kind of woman. “If I want to get married someday, I’ll get me one from Germany,” he said.
But for the time being this would do.
“We make a nice Sunday evening of it: we sit in the cafe a while with the girls, and then we head for the fields. Without too much fuss—pants off and go to it. And never any of that whining, like: Do we have to do it again so soon? Of course not, the more often the better.”
“Were you ever in Germany?” he asked the other man in the cell.
“Not I, and I don’t look forward to it either. It’s s’posed to be pretty bad in those camps. They talked about Amersfoort. Do they want to send you to Germany?”
“No, I don’t mean that. I was there in the ’20s and ’30s, mostly in wintertime, but if there was no work at home then sometimes during the summer too. I had a woman there I’d like to have stayed with.”
“I wish you’d talk about something else,” said the other. “Women is the last thing I need right now. And it would be better to think about your own wife; right now she must need you pretty bad.”
“That’s never been the case. I’ve had a great housekeeper in her. She can really keep things together, she’s very good at that. I haven’t slept with her in years.”
Dad had said it more than once: With Hindrik every shot is a hit, and you only have one, and even that was a mistake. I don’t get it, a big fleshy woman like Gryt, do you mount her often enough?
Geart Heida said that too when the two of them were at the fair in Beets. “Why don’t you try it with that girl with the big buns, that’s something to grab onto.”
Geart arranged it with Gryt’s girlfriend, whom he said later had put out that very same night. According to Geart, he could easily have scored with Gryt, too, if he only handled it right. And so he made a few more runs. But he probably would never have succeeded if the four of them hadn’t had too much brandy at the fair in Gorredijk. Later that night they landed in the haymow of the farm where the other girl worked, and Gryt had to play along if she didn’t want to be a spoilsport.
A mistake, Dad said later.
A bad mistake, even though he didn’t realize it at the time. He had sex, as they called it, when he felt like it, but not often because Gryt didn’t want it very often. She’d rather not have it at all.
The girl in Germany was different. They were sluts really, said Douwe Krist.
That kind of slut I would’ve liked to have, he thought. As often as I lay waiting in the back of the house for Germ and the girl, that’s as often as I thought about it. The kind of girl Willem described as one who just about crawls inside your pants. One who’s pretty easy to talk to, enjoys sex, and is not scared of life. That’s the kind I would’ve liked to have kids with and I wouldn’t have worried about it, not with that kind of woman.
And I’ve always wanted to oppose everything, just like Dad. I really wanted to be against the Germans. And once we’d gotten rid of them, and others like that rightist schoolteacher with the orange ribbon got into power, then we’d start all over again. Because our kind of people are meant to be rebels. It’s always been that way and that’s how it’ll stay. Our kind thrives under repression.
“And that’s what I had always wanted,” he said aloud.
“You can go to hell as far as I’m concerned,” said the other man. “Damn it, I sure wish I was outta here. Why don’t you help me, man.”
The soldiers stood by the bunk and when he didn’t get up quickly enough, they yanked him off.
The man in the bare room tried one more time. “Use your senses, man.”
They beat him again. The man stayed too and kept yelling, “Confess, you must confess.” The man worked himself into a sweat.
At last they put him down on the chair again to recover.
The man was gone for five minutes. When he returned, he said: “You will now go to the other side, to the specialists. We call that a stiffer interrogation. But you can still get out of it.”
They pulled him up; the man stood in the door. “Well, are we going to get something?”
He said: “Go to hell, you bastard.”
He wanted to kick him in the belly, but the soldiers yanked him back.
They dragged him through the corridor and he didn’t see the man again.
Later, after each torture session, they asked him if he was about ready to confess. At first he lashed out, but they soon overpowered him. He was tied down and then all he could do was scream.
They shot him early in the morning on the outskirts of Leeuwarden, at the same time as the other prisoner who had seen too much and therefore also had to be executed, though he never understood why.
But he did.
He saw how they let the other man walk on ahead and then shot him in the back of the head, and he heard as they came his way afterward.
He also saw the beginning of dawn on the horizon. Other days at this time he’d be out on the lake.
He would very much like to know where the girl was right now. He did hope that Gryt would keep the child with her.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Rink van der Velde
Translation Copyright © 1997 by Henry J. Baron
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2868-4
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