by Sara Young
My aunt's face crumpled when I told her about Anneke's pregnancy. She pressed her hands over her mouth and looked as if I were striking her. It had never occurred to me that she had held secret dreams for her daughter, but now they lay exposed in her eyes, and it was terrible to watch them shatter and die. She didn't say anything to blame Anneke, or even Karl, but I could see her tighten her lips against the words.
We brought Anneke down to her own bed and for an hour we simply cared for her. We brushed her hair and put on a fresh nightgown. I put a clean bandage on her finger—the wound was not healing well. Anneke allowed us to do these things, but she stared past us to the window as if she could see through the blackout paper. I made her cocoa and toast with the last of the gooseberry jam, her favorite, then brought up the blue-and-white Delft vase of yellow tea roses from the kitchen windowsill. My aunt asked no questions, only murmured, "Lieveling, lieveling." I wondered how much it cost her to swallow every "How could you?" and "If only." The branching nature of consequences was so easy to see when it was too late.
At last Anneke sat up and began to talk. It wasn't that Karl didn't love her. But he had to leave. He was being sent back to Germany. Worse, he had a fiancée in Hamburg; they would marry when he got there. Anneke broke down again. "She doesn't mean anything to him," she managed. "But he has no choice. He's promised her."
I was filled with indignation—at Anneke, for defending this man, and at Karl, too: How foolish, to marry someone he didn't love, and leave Anneke alone with his child. Keeping his promise had nothing to do with real honor. I would find him in the morning and make him see.
Anneke suddenly remembered her father. "He's in Amsterdam," Tante Mies told her. "He went this afternoon for a shipment of wool. It was held up and he's spending the night." Anneke slumped in relief. "But he'll be home tomorrow on the evening train," Tante Mies warned her. "And you know we can't keep this from him."
Anneke's eyes pleaded for more time. "It will be all right," my aunt assured her, stroking her forehead. "I'll tell him, and it will be all right."
My aunt gave Anneke a sleeping pill and asked me to stay and read to her until it took effect. I looked around the room for the right book. A new collection by Verwey was by my bed. Also Rilke's Poems from the Book of Hours, its pages thickened from my constant fingering. I loved Rilke. It seemed to me he had fired his poems through time like arrows directly into my heart. But those poems would wound Anneke tonight.
I asked my aunt to bring up the copy of Libelle I had seen in the kitchen. It was a women's magazine, full of foolish articles that Anneke and I swore we were too worldly for, but devoured every month. It was a good choice, and soon Anneke fell asleep.
I couldn't, though. I went back up to the attic room and pushed the bed under the skylight, climbed up, and opened it to look out. Before the Germans attacked, Anneke and I used to love to do this; from this vantage point we could see the whole skyline of Rotterdam and the harbor at the mouth of the River Maas. No matter the time, the city was always bright with life. The night of May 14, the whole family had stared in disbelief at the charred silhouette of our lost city, black against the flames, until we could not breathe the sooty proof any longer. A snowstorm of ash covered our town for days as Rotterdam burned—the Germans shot anyone who tried to put out a fire as a warning to the rest of us. We hadn't looked out again after that night.
Now I needed to look. Light from a waning quarter moon—since the blackout restrictions, we had all become experts in the phases of the moon—spilled over the dark city, which still looked ragged and scorched after a year and a half. There were a few dull lights to the east, where the docks were; probably the Germans working their sleek gray boats. I planned the things I would say to Karl in the morning. Whatever it took, I would say.
Then I closed the skylight and sat on the bed—I had things to say to Isaak as well. I went over the conversations we had had earlier. He wanted me to leave because he loved me. Isaak would never tell me this; it wasn't his nature to talk about how he felt. It was for me to wring the softer meaning from his hard words.
But I was safe now. There would be no German husband for Anneke to tell, and as long as no one knew I was half-Jewish, the new decrees had no effect on me. Besides, they were only decrees. Insulting and inconvenient, but not threatening. Isaak worried too much about things that might never happen. If it ever came that he was in danger, then we would leave. We would leave together. I would make him see this.
I awoke at dawn, left a note, and cycled into town.
My aunt was right: There were more soldiers now. Pairs of them stood at each entrance to the park across the street; others were nailing up notices. More were at each tram stop, checking ID cards. One of them glanced at me as I rode by; even when he touched his helmet and smiled, my heart skidded. Karl's unit was billeted in several of the houses on Ruyterstraat—Anneke had shown me which one last week. By the time I got to it I wasn't sure my legs would hold me. But I knew a trick to make myself do things when I was afraid: I told myself I just had to take the first step.
Today, for example, I merely had to knock on a door. After that, I could leave.
A grandmotherly woman, short and fat, with an old-fashioned white cap and a long apron answered the door. "Goedemorgen!" She smiled up at me and I wished her good morning back, and that was that. In another moment, I had asked to see the German soldier named Karl. And then I was in her kitchen, which was rose-colored and smelled of cloves and bleach and normalcy, and she was offering me coffee. "Ersatz, phhht!" She grimaced and rolled her eyes as if to say, What are we going to do about it, eh?
She led me to the back door. "There they are; they take their exercises in the garden. Last week they stomped all over my jasmine. Go on out."
Two soldiers. They had their backs to me but I could tell neither was Karl. My chest began to squeeze again, but I had no choice now. They turned at the sound of my footsteps, and I was shocked to see how young they were.
I asked for Karl Getz.
"He's gone," the taller one said. This boy had brown hair and a round face, and didn't even look as if he shaved yet. "When will he be back?"
The soldier narrowed his eyes for a second, then seemed to decide I was no threat. "No, he's gone. Munich. You missed him by an hour."
My German was good, but I was sure I had misunderstood. "Munich? He wasn't ordered back to Hamburg?"
No, both of them assured me, Karl wasn't going to Hamburg. They exchanged looks, and then the other boy, the quieter one, whose hair was lighter and curly, took a step toward me and asked if I were Karl's girlfriend.
I ignored the question. "What about his fiancée? Will they still be married?"
The soldiers looked at each other again, smirked. "I guess he's been keeping a secret from us."
And then I understood. "Never mind."
"Wait," the shorter one said. "What's your name?"
I saw he was nothing more than lonely, so eager to talk for a minute that I felt sorry for him. "No, I ... I'm sorry I bothered you." I turned to leave, but he tried again.
"I just wondered if..." He stopped and looked away, then brushed at his hair as though it had fallen over his forehead. I heard him take a sharp breath and then he looked back at me. "I wondered if you wanted to do something tonight ... go to a café? It's only that you look very much like my sister, and I haven't seen her for so long."
I mumbled an excuse about having to work at night, and fled.
I pedaled over the cobbled streets as fast as I could. The world was cracking in two. One world held boy soldiers who missed their sisters and longed to sit in cafés with girls. The other held men who wrapped girls' heads in latrine filth, and sliced my family from me, and who would not let me pass into a park or a tram if they knew who I was.
The world was cracking in two, and I was falling into the void.
FIVE
All that day before my uncle arrived, we waited as if for a storm. Even the air was heavy. I phoned
the bakery and said Anneke had sprained her ankle. We made ourselves busy; we washed windows, made apple dumplings and pea soup. We cleaned out the hearth and took blankets from chests and aired them in preparation for winter. We never once mentioned Anneke's condition or speculated on my uncle's reaction to it, but every time I stole a glance at my aunt's face, it was folded in worry. My cousin's face was blank, and this was worse. I wanted to smash something, or scream.
Finally I couldn't bear it anymore. "Anneke and I are leaving now," I said, in the middle of the afternoon. We had planned to go out in the evening, just before my uncle's train was due, to eat our dinner at a café while my aunt was to eat with him at home. She had bought him his favorite pickled ham and would speak to him after the meal. This wouldn't have been my way. I would have simply said to him: Here's what's happened. Now accept it and support your daughter. I wouldn't have fed him delicacies to make the news more palatable.
Anneke was content to follow my lead. We took the train into Scheveningen. The afternoon was warm, so we took off our shoes and stockings and strolled along the strand, and then walked out to the end of the pier, hanging out over the pilings to watch the fishing boats unload in the sunset. We hadn't seen a single German soldier since getting off the train, and miraculously there was nothing to remind us of the Occupation except some bunkers built on the dunes—the kind that always made us laugh, painted to look like Dutch houses with silly windows and geraniums. Did the Germans really hope they would fool anyone?
We found a bistro and drank beer and ate fried flounder, and then a cake with cherries. We talked about nothing troubling, as if we had laid our problems beside us like shopping parcels: Anneke told me about Kees, the baker's son, who had just gotten his first bicycle, and I told her about Mrs. Schaap's little red and white chickens, who were refusing to lay. After dinner, we lingered over coffee. I think both of us knew that night might be the last for such things.
Finally Anneke began to talk about Karl. He was more passionate, more mature than the boys she had dated before. A man. If he hadn't been sent away, she said, they might have worked this out. Because he loved her. But he had to keep his promise.
I felt so grieved for her, knowing the truth, and feared this would show. "I need to tell you something," I said. "I went to speak to Karl this morning."
Anneke froze, startled.
"He wasn't there," I said quickly. "But I spoke to two of his friends. He was gone already. The orders to leave came earlier than he'd thought. He was very upset; he didn't want to leave you. He told them that." I would have said anything to ease her pain.
She looked at me, her expression unreadable, and turned toward the window. "Well."
And then it was time to go home, both of us knew. As we left the bistro, a soldier stopped us on the pretext of asking if we had a light. Of course he was really just drawn to Anneke. All men were. She ignored him, keeping her eyes on the street, but he was reluctant to let us go. He was Austrian, he said. He had been a teacher. He played the piano. "Do you know where I could find music here at night?" he wanted to know. Will you come listen to music with me? his eyes ached to ask Anneke.
Anneke turned her head away and stepped past him to leave, but I could see that tears gleamed.
She was quiet on the train back, but I could tell she wasn't afraid. The worst had already happened. My uncle's reaction would be meaningless in the face of what she already had to carry.
He was waiting for us in the hall.
I'd expected him to be furious; his temper flew to extremes. But his face was cool, and when he saw Anneke, his eyes filled with something worse than anger.
She took a step toward him. "Vader?" It was the smallest of voices.
He threw up his arms to ward off her embrace and twisted his head away. "Stupid whore!" he spat. "You are not my daughter."
My uncle delivered each word as deliberately as a blow, and each one found its mark. Anneke wrapped her arms around her belly—how quickly the body knows where it's most vulnerable.
"You are not my daughter!" he repeated. Then he took his coat from its peg and stormed out.
My aunt stood by and let him go. She only put her arms around Anneke. "It's all right. He's just upset now."
It was not all right. I opened the door and called to him from the step, enraged. "What kind of a father would call his daughter a whore? What kind of a father would walk out on her?"
Even under the thin moonlight, I saw his face darken in rage. "You are not my daughter, either. Remember that."
"I'm glad of it!" I cried. "You're worse than no father at all!"
"Cyrla, no!" My aunt pulled me inside.
I hated my uncle for the look I saw on Anneke's face. I followed her up to our room and watched her carefully, wishing I could think of something to erase it. Something to make her look proud again. We pulled our nightgowns out from under our pillows and undressed without a word.
Finally, when we were in our beds, I broke the silence. "Tell me how it feels. Tell me how to do it."
"How what feels? Oh!" She laughed. "You won't need instructions, katje! Your body will know what to do, and your heart."
"I know what to do, Anneke ... I want you to tell me how to do it."
"Really, you'll know." Anneke paused and stroked her curls from her forehead. I knew instantly that Karl had done this. "It will feel as if your body has always known how to make love, was born to do it, but didn't realize it until you met him."
I frowned at her.
"Oh, all right," she sighed. "But really, it's natural, and you only have to do what your body's urging you to do. Have you felt it, that urge?"
Yes, I said, I had felt the urge to make love.
"No. I mean have you touched each other, stroked each other and kissed until you felt it in your body, between your legs, like electricity. The urge to pull him inside you—a heat."
No, I admitted, not yet.
"Well, that's the first, then. Once you feel that, you can let go."
I raised my eyebrows at her, waiting.
"Cyrla, honestly, don't you know?" She paused again, remembering, I supposed, that I hadn't gone to school for a long time. Since the days of Napoleon, all the cities in the Netherlands had recorded each birth, death, and marriage in their registers, with duplicates at The Hague. Though I had papers, I wouldn't be in those civil registers, so my aunt had decided that until the Germans left I shouldn't risk going to school. For the same reason, I worked only in my uncle's shop. My closest friend had moved from Scheidam after the bombings, and so I'd had almost no contact at all with other girls for a year and a half.
"All right," she said. "Here it is. Kiss him. His tongue is his soul. Pull it into you, give yourself into his mouth. Breathe his breath. Hold him, touch him. Learn his face, his chest, his belly ... lower. Be gentle when you stroke him; it will make him want to be in you. And that's it. Truly. The rest will be natural, as if you couldn't possibly do anything else. It will feel as if ... it will feel as if with every movement you're saying to yourselves, 'I know you! I know you!' And afterward ... afterward, the world will be singing in your ears."
"Thank you, Anneke." This was what Isaak never saw in my cousin, and what I often forgot: how generous she was. Once I had confided in her my dream to become a poet. "Well, but you already are," she'd said. "It's in the way you choose your words, in the way you see things and the way you show them to me."
Until then, I had only read poetry, and never written it. Lines had come to me—often senseless—and I would find myself jotting them down, but I had never followed them deeper to shape them into form and meaning. That night I had found the courage to write my first poem: four lines about grace.
I was the selfish one, so glad she wasn't leaving me now.
"So? Aren't you going to tell me who it is? I'm sorry—I was so wrapped up in Karl, I guess I wasn't asking about you."
"It's Isaak, of course!"
"Isaak? Oh."
"Oh, what?"
I waited for her to explain.
"Your hymen. You can break it yourself; it's not hard. Gera told me; her aunt told her, and she knows these things. Use something smooth and rounded, not too big. Gera's aunt says some cultures carved little goddesses from stone or wood to do it, and it was a sacred ritual. But anything will do; a spoon is fine. Clean."
"What did you use?" I asked.
Anneke laughed and even in the darkness I could sense her rolling her eyes—for just that second she was back, her old self. "Jan Wegerif!"
I sat up. "Jan Wegerif? I didn't know you ever went out with him!"
"I didn't. We just sneaked onto his grandfather's houseboat one time. It was terrible. That's why I'm telling you to use something first. And Cyrla, one more thing."
"Yes?"
"Don't get pregnant."
SIX
My uncle didn't soften. For the next two days, he glared his disgust at Anneke and ignored me. He was hardly ever there though—either he was too angry to come home for lunch, or he was too busy. The shipment of wool he had received was for an order from the German army for six hundred blankets.
This made me uneasy. My uncle was as upset by the Occupation and its discomforts as anyone I knew, and was especially outraged to hear the constant trains rumbling eastward, loaded with plundered Dutch goods—each container stamped with the insulting lie: A gift from the people of Holland to their German brothers. I'd always assumed his anti-German stance was based on principle—certainly he had many friends among the Jewish merchants who sold him supplies on Breedstraat in Amsterdam. But lately, although I never heard him express sympathy with the Nazis, I'd begun to wonder if he was entirely unsympathetic.