Ashes

by Christopher de Vinck

  He stomped out of the house, cursing the stones under his feet, and I followed. His arms swung back and forth like the arms of an angry wind-up tin soldier. I trailed behind him, swinging my arms, stepping into the tracks he made in the earth with his thick-soled shoes. Sometimes I had to take extra steps to keep up with his forceful stride.

  When he reached the river on that hot day, my father unbuttoned his shirt, pulled off his shoes and socks, and dived into the river. I remember how white his broad back looked when he popped up from the water and began cutting into the surface with his one good arm.

  ‘Simone,’ my father waved, ‘come in. It’s much cooler in the water.’

  I stood on the edge of the river, realizing how little my father knew about me. Perhaps if I had been a boy, he would have known that I could not swim. When I shook my head in refusal, he barked an order that made me jump like the ivory tiles on the mah-jong table. ‘Simone! Come here!’

  I sat on the grass, unbuttoned my black walking shoes, and from my little white feet I peeled off my pearl socks, as if removing the outer skin of an onion.

  ‘Simone!’

  I stood up and slipped my yellow cotton dress above my head, letting it fall to the ground in defeat. I stood beside the rippling water in my thin camisole. I looked at my father – a little girl who did not know how to swim.

  ‘Simone!’ he entreated for the fourth time.

  I held my nose and jumped into the water. When I sank, bubbles and my father’s arms surrounded me in a rush of trapped air and laughter.

  ‘You silly girl!’ my father chuckled as I draped my arms around his neck and shivered. ‘Don’t you know how to swim?’

  I looked into his face and shook my head in shame.

  ‘Come here, my brave little swimmer.’ My father bent my arms in classic swimmer’s positions. He held me up on the water’s surface with his wide hand at the small of my back as I learned how to float. I was his tame little seal, eager to please, and delighted to feel the water push against my face as I learned how to kick my legs and feet in a steady churn of water and muscles.

  What I remember most were the water lilies. Before we went home, I had gained enough confidence in my new talent that I was able to swim in the river with my eyes open. I liked seeing my father turn into a wiggling form worthy of Picasso’s paintings, as I looked at him through the thick lens of the turbulent water. But then I swam out a bit further and dived down into the cool green river. The sun penetrated the surface and illuminated my body like that of a river salmon, and when I looked up, I saw the outline of water lilies: dark shadows surrounded by light. They floated on the surface of the water as I swam beneath them, their shadows rippling over my arms and legs. I felt as if I was in a new world and that things were changing in ways that I didn’t yet understand.

  As Sergeant De Waden and I rode through the Royal Park, I had been thinking about swimming in that river, the water lilies floating over my head. Until, suddenly, my distant memories of the lilies were viciously transformed into the shadows of large, distant bombers with long wings and churning engines.

  The air throbbed and resonated, vibrating with a low-pitched drone that quickly drowned the confused cries of mothers and children. Black dots appeared in the sky, scattered across the far horizon, like gnats on a summer’s evening. They pulsed nearer and nearer, their shapes gaining clarity as they advanced, engines straining forward, screaming their arrival.

  As the sudden swarm of black bombers thundered overhead, a palpable wave of panic nearly knocked me off the horse. My throat tightened, and my fists clung to Sergeant De Waden so firmly that he almost couldn’t pry me from his body as he twisted and shouted above the noise:, ‘Simone, I have to go! The Nazis are here and I have to report. Climb down, now! Climb down and go straight home!’

  As he guided me from the horse, my throat so tight now that I could barely breathe, I wanted to cry out to him. I wanted to ask him what was happening. I wanted to ask him to take me with him . . . if I was going to die . . . if he would marry me. But all I could do was stand there in a daze and watch him ride away, his voice becoming fainter, ‘Go home, Simone! Go home!’

  Hitler had invaded Belgium.

  CHAPTER 19

  On 10 May 1940, Hitler proclaimed the word Danzig over the radio – the code word for his troops to begin the invasion of Western Europe – thus sending his forces into Holland and Belgium, en route to France. On the same day, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain.

  Aircraft continued to rumble overhead, unceasingly, one after another. Their shadows rippled across my face and arms. Sun, shadow. Sun, shadow. Menacing, dark, in formation – a monster.

  The sun illuminated the heavy iron crosses adorning the aircrafts’ wings, the planes’ metallic bodies glinted grey against the clouds. The low growl of their engines shattered the peaceful sky, threatening and belligerent.

  I could not believe what I was seeing. My father had warned me. My aunt had warned me. People in the street had said it was a certitude. Yet I had refused to believe them. But there it was, the German air force, blotting the Belgian sky, invading my country, invading my soul. Why was this happening? What did these people want with the park, my horse, and with my thumbnail-size country? There was no longer any distance between me and the war, between me and the encroaching monster. Hitler’s forces were invading Belgium.

  Run! I thought.

  At first, in the Royal Park, everyone remained immobile and stared up into the sky as if transfixed by something almost beautiful. Then an old woman lifted her small arm, pointed upward and said, ‘Le Boche’. She repeated the word again, this time with a shrillness to her words: ‘Le Boche! Le Boche!’ The sound sent chills through my body.

  The people in the park began to run in all directions. I looked for my sergeant and Charlotte, but they were gone. Mothers pushed their baby carriages with force and determination. Girls abandoned their jump ropes. Boys looked up into the sky as their fathers dragged them from the grass.

  As the sky swarmed with German planes, a balloon vendor released his yellow, red, and green balloons, which floated upward as if on a mission to chase them away.

  Looking up overhead I was reminded of the flying monkeys in the film The Wizard of Oz; how they had grabbed Dorothy and Toto at the command of the Wicked Witch of the West. I stood, not understanding, the cobblestones under my feet and the shadows of the planes cutting across my body.

  I clutched at my arms and shoulders and whispered, ‘My arms! My arms!’ My childhood fear of resembling my father crept up on me once again, released from my subconscious by the sinister portent I was witnessing. ‘I don’t want to look like my father. I don’t want my arms to dangle uselessly at my side,’ I muttered to myself.

  That is when I heard the sergeant’s voice echoing in my ears, ‘Go home, Simone! Go home!’ and I too began to run.

  I didn’t know then that Hitler’s army had invaded Holland, Luxembourg, and Belgium simultaneously. I didn’t know that Hitler would soon clear a passage through the Ardennes, a region of thick forest and rough terrain, and surprise the Belgian army. I had no inkling that the SS, Hitler’s elite paramilitary force, planned to capture and shoot my father because he had blown up bridges and cut telegraph lines to slow the German advance.

  All I knew was the moaning of those horrible planes flying over me as I ran, trying to escape the noise and confusion, trying to get home. I understood that Germany and Russia invaded Poland. I understood that Hitler had invaded Norway and Denmark, but my father had said Belgium was neutral. We were a peace-loving nation. Hitler here, in Brussels, was incomprehensible. All I knew was that I had to escape this monstrous intrusion.

  When I reached the street, I saw buses at a standstill and people rushing down alleys. Office workers ran out of the buildings and looked up into the sky. It was as if a mythical and terrible dragon had descended on the city, breathing fire; the harbinger of destruction – the Dragon of the Second World
War. Smoke filled the square with a thick, acrid fog and as I ran through the street it squeezed my lungs. I coughed, choked, and saw flames catch hold of buildings and fields – fire so bright it was almost blinding. Brussels was burning.

  I remembered my father talking of Blitzkrieg. Lightning war. Now it made sense. The planes had come from nowhere, rolling over the horizon like storm clouds on a summer’s evening; black, relentless, powerful, unyielding. Tanks rolled over open fields and hedgerows. Elite squads of soldiers with parachutes dropped from the sky, striking the ground like bolts from above.

  I must get back to the house, I thought. Papa said to stay in the house!

  When I reached my front door, I struggled to unlock it. I dug into my pocket for the key. My hand shook. I dropped the key. It bounced on the pavement. People ran back and forth. A woman with a sack of potatoes nearly knocked me over. A man with a cane waved me aside as he rushed through the crowd. I was desperate to find that key. The planes were still coming. Danger was approaching. I imagined I could feel the heat of the engines on my neck. I remember looking down and seeing the high-heeled shoes of well-dressed women, the plain black shoes of a priest. The butcher, the postman, a woman from my church, people I recognized, all hurried away. I felt like a twig caught in a tornado, twirling in the chaos. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

  ‘Mademoiselle Simone!’

  I heard my name as if coming from a tunnel.

  ‘Mademoiselle Simone! Here! Here!’

  I turned towards the voice. Standing in the middle of the whirling crowd was little Nicole. She held her hand up in the air, and in her hand was my key.

  ‘I have it here. Your key!’ She waved her arm back and forth. My little saviour.

  Nicole ran to me, dodging men with suitcases and women with bags of vegetables and bread. ‘Here’s your key!’

  When the girl reached out her hand, I grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the way of a large man pushing a cart filled with furniture. I pressed Nicole’s small head against my chest as I held her, trying to protect her, trying to protect myself, trying to protect all of Belgium.

  I heard explosions in the distance as planes thundered overhead. Suddenly, as we huddled on the front stoop, a deafening crash like a giant tree falling to the earth erupted from the sky. A bomb struck a nearby apartment building, bursting it open like a nutcracker, sending flaming bricks and shards of glass careening into the streets. The entire front wall toppled over, cries of terror rose from within, and as an air-raid siren wailed, the fire consumed the building. Black smoke rose into the air like a victorious dragon.

  Madame Johnson appeared at her door.

  ‘Nicole!’ she shouted. ‘Come inside! Quick! Come inside now! Simone, are you okay?’ I nodded as I released Nicole, who was crying now and desperate to run into her mother’s arms.

  ‘Go home!’ Sergeant De Waden’s voice echoed in my head. Then the voice became my father’s. ‘Stay inside the house, Simone. Stay in the house!’

  ‘I’m okay.’ I cleared my throat and waved to Madame Johnson. ‘I just need to get into the house.’

  Madame Johnson nodded, blew me a kiss, and hurried through her front door.

  CHAPTER 20

  My Luftwaffe is invincible.

  Hermann Göring, German Air Force Minister

  One Saturday morning, the year before the Nazi invasion, Hava and I read Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene together. In the afternoon, we walked to the park with jam sandwiches in a cloth bag. We pretended that a large linden tree on the boulevard was the deceitful witch Duessa, who followed us as we walked. Hava liked to pretend she was the Knight of Holiness, peeking under the dress of Duessa. ‘Look at the ugly veins on her legs,’ she cooed as she stroked the bark of the tree. People looked at us as if we were mad – two schoolgirls laughing under a tree.

  Hava insisted that I play Redcrosse, the Knight of Chastity. In the story, when Redcrosse and his girlfriend, Una, were travelling together, they came upon a land that had been burned, stomped on, flattened, and destroyed by a dragon. I still remember the lines that Hava and I memorized: ‘That dreadful Dragon they espide,/Where stretcht he lay upon the sunny side,/Of a great hill . . .’

  That’s what I thought about when the Nazi planes appeared in the sky on 10 May, like hundreds of black dragons ready to destroy everything beneath them with their fiery breath: little Nicole, the park, Hava. I said a quick prayer for Hava and hoped she and her family were safe in their home.

  I inserted the key into the keyhole, wishing that when I turned it, the house, like a magic clock, would turn time backwards and I would find my father inside smoking his pipe, reading the paper, greeting me by name: ‘Simone!’

  As the door opened like the slab from a tomb, there was no resurrection, only silence. The air was still and damp. With each step on the stone floor, the hard heels of my shoes clicked . . . clicked . . . clicked . . . My father’s chair was empty. The light from each window was dull. The kitchen tap dripped. Simone. Simone. Simone.

  I locked the door behind me, ran to the kitchen and turned on the radio. The news broadcast confirmed the worst:

  . . . the complete destruction of the Belgian Air Force. It has also been reported that the bridges over the Albert Canal and the Eben-Emael fortress have been destroyed by bombs. German paratroopers are reported to the north, as are tanks and heavily armed German infantry troops. Hitler’s forces are quickly spreading south towards Brussels.’

  All I knew about warfare was from reading about the American Civil War in the novel, Gone with the Wind. As batteries of infantry had poured shells into Atlanta, killing people in their homes, ripping roofs off buildings, tearing huge craters in the streets, the townsfolk had sheltered as best they could in cellars, in holes in the ground, and in shallow tunnels dug into railway lines. Atlanta had been under siege. Was Brussels my Atlanta?

  Nazi troops poured into Belgium like a million ants spreading across the garden on a warm, spring day. I looked at the ceiling and heard the German planes panting and growling. I imagined a giant with a black moustache ripping the roof from my house, reaching in and pulling me away to my death.

  I noticed the kitchen had lost its aroma of bread. I heard the wheeze of my own breathing. I had to pretend this was all a mistake, all a dream. I had to make myself believe that I was not involved with the war, that it had nothing to do with me. I had nothing the Germans wanted or needed. I was alone. In my fatigue and fear I staggered from room to room, looking for an exit, a way out, a way to blue sky and the opera, and being eighteen.

  After the First World War, the French had built what they called the Maginot Line; long defensive fortifications that stretched along the French and German border. The French nation did not want to be attacked again as it had been during the First World War, so France had constructed bunkers for machine guns, guard posts, anti-tank obstacles, and underground tunnels.

  I decided to build my own Maginot Line. I walked around the house and locked all the doors and windows. I reached above the bookshelf in the living room for my father’s First World War rifle, and found the bullets in the dresser where he kept pictures of my mother, and where I had finally stored his Croix de Guerre.

  I heard more explosions. A floristry shop across the street blazed, flames engulfed the building. Smoke billowed out from the church steeple. The wail of the air-raid signal screamed through the city and shattered the calm I had thought I possessed.

  I grabbed the bullets and the rifle and rushed downstairs to begin my Maginot Line. I leaned the rifle against the locked front door, walked through the living room and into the kitchen, where I decided to make some soup. Hava had once shared with me an old Jewish proverb: ‘Worries go down better with soup than without.’

  As I rummaged under the sink for the soup pot, without warning, the house shook, and more loud explosions rumbled nearby. It sounded like thunder, but when I looked out of the window, the flash of light was not coming from the sky, but from the horizon. Blitz
krieg. Everywhere I looked I saw plumes of smoke rose up above the roof lines of my neighbours’ homes. Was my house next? Would my Maginot Line hold? I was shaking, but I persisted with my soup. I needed the distraction of normalcy to keep me from falling apart.

  I rubbed my arms, peeled carrots, potatoes, and onions, and as I chopped them on a small board, I wondered if they might be the last vegetables that I would see for some time.

  More explosions reverberated in the distance just as I was reaching into the icebox for the chicken broth that I’d been saving. I grabbed a saucepan, dropped a bit of oil into the pot, added the mixed vegetables, and stirred until they softened.

  More bombs. I poured the chicken broth into the pot and brought the soup to the boil. I watched the blue flames dance against the underside of the pot as the soup boiled into a frenzy, before I reduced it to a simmer. That’s where flames belonged – under pots.

  Hitler had not been invited for dinner. Soup did not feed a tank. I would remain a calm, brave Belgian woman and make my soup in defiance of the broiling horror outside my windows.

  CHAPTER 21

  German troops engaged in a surprise attack through Belgium and the Netherlands, during their push into France. French troops were overrun. The German army lost 150,000 soldiers, but the Allies lost over 360,000 men and the British army retreated to the French coast.

  I sat on a kitchen chair watching steam rise from the saucepan. The steam, in my mind, turned to gunsmoke and I imagined Union and Confederate soldiers from Atlanta shooting their rifles at close range. I had read in Gone with the Wind how men, already near death, wounded and bleeding, had walked through the smoke like ghosts, dazed by the war, dazed by sudden attacks, afraid, and in great pain. I shuddered. Would I see wounded Belgians staggering through the haze outside my windows?