They were standing behind Jannosch’s caravan and looking at the stallion, which was already getting thin.
“How do we know those bastards won’t come and get him?” asked Jannosch.
“They’ll stay away for the time being,” said Gerard, thinking of his two best Gelderland horses that had been requisitioned in August. “They’ve already been around to mine.”
It was the time when the Wellingtons and the B26s flew over the northern Netherlands to the German cities. Planes were regularly shot down and the crews had to be picked up and taken across the border to the south. The trains were patrolled by Dutch and also German police with a list of missing persons who ordered travelers to show their papers at random. When Gerard had asked Jannosch one day whether he would help one of them, one of those pilots, escape through the woods, the Gypsy — purely according to the code of friendship — hadn’t hesitated for a moment, he had just nodded.
She didn’t discover the address immediately. Gerard and Netty’s farmhouse was outside the village. The fact that an occasional farmhand who never had a shovel in his hand was suddenly digging with boundless energy in the vegetable garden was not noticeable, nor was the lodger with the bleached hair who was afraid of the dog. People came and went. Sometimes there was suddenly a sociable guest, some Tom or John with a heart of gold who didn’t understand a word of Dutch but had learned to cycle on the path past the orchard. That kind of customer usually wound up with Jannosch Franz. I imagine how the Gypsy and the Allied foreigner have settled themselves in the trap in the pitch black of night, with blankets and headgear made of sheepskins and mole fur. A bag at their feet. “Are you sitting okay?” asks Gerard. “Yes, we’re sitting okay, just open the gate.” Jannosch gives his horse a quiet command.
Now back to the evening in January, a date that can’t have been any more ominous than the rest of the calendar in those days. The weather has been gray all day, with rain clouds that toward six o’clock merge imperceptibly with the darkness. At seven o’clock the farm lies there cold and still, with just a bicycle by the door and a dog sprawled longingly under a lean-to. No sign of the horse that will shortly be fitted with saddlebags by the farmer’s wife.
There’s an operation on this evening. It will be a well- prepared raid in which three men and a woman will take part. When I think of that evening I think first of all of the moments before the woman comes in along the tiled hall and, half amused and half contemptuous because of the inner knowledge she has, pops up in the kitchen doorway with a “Here we are, then!” It is the moment when Gerard, Jannosch, and the policeman are sitting waiting for her impatiently, because she is the one who has been able to borrow Controller De Krol’s car for one or at most two hours.
In front of them on the table there is a map. They are looking at it, but do not discuss much because their attention is focused on the cold and silence outside. Within the hour the town hall in Delden will be broken into. The woman will keep watch by the car and the three of them will ring the bell, give the password, and then tie up or knock unconscious the civilian custodian, from the Dutch Nazi Party. Then they must remember to turn off the alarm. The ration cards, inserts, and control stamps are in fireproof safes behind the distribution rooms. They’ll get those first, and then, if the whole business goes as easily as they anticipate, they’ll mess up the system of personal registration of the municipality by taking the population files and the pedigree books and breeding licenses, which, except for the blank passes — Ausweise — will later be burnt in Gerard’s backyard. The Zwolle district of the Dutch underground is in desperate need of distribution documents. The ration cards will be transported that very same night by Jannosch in his saddlebags.
There is the sound of the car. Gerard walks to the window, pulls the blackout curtain aside and sees the round yellow headlights turning onto the path. A dog rushes outside, hair on end, but the animal will only leap around the visitor a little: She is an habitué.
Fine, everything’s going according to plan, the only question is, whose plan is it? Gerard stands by the table again and the other two are busy exchanging cigarettes and lights when the woman, almost on time, appears in the doorway and turns the whole scene — conspirators, kitchen stove, chairs and table, coffee cups, ashtray, and hanging lamp — into something desperately absurd.
“Here we are, then!”
She unbuttons her coat, her face set in an expression of greeting, and smiles at Gerard and the policeman, both of whom she’s gotten to know very well. When she turns to Jannosch, at her ease and still standing, she clarifies her smile by extending a hand. She makes eye contact and offers her name.
“Here,” says Gerard, when she has sat down between him and Jannosch. He places his outspread fingers on the plan of the municipal office. She cranes her neck. “Here’s the situation.”
Lively but unconvinced, she joins in the conversation about the details of doors, corridors, rooms, and the alarm. The policeman is now leaning over the table, all useless attendon, but the other man, the one with the coal-black eyes, restricts himself to the occasional nod. She glances in curiosity at the dark hand resting on the table, very thin, a cigarette between the fingers. He takes deep drags on it and keeps the smoke in his lungs.
She — I note — has no idea who he is. Nor where he comes from or with whom he’s connected. For a few weeks she and her friend the Kriminal-Assistent have been looking for an opening in an illegal escape route. The man whom the lady now has next to her is someone used to going his own way. Yet, almost without knowing it himself, he is a member of the organization of Jules Haeck, a wholesaler in vegetables and fruit in Hengelo, a Frenchman by birth, who helps prisoners of war and shot-down airmen across the border. Recently a trap was set for the man from Hengelo. Reliable information obtained by Mrs. Nieboer came to nothing because of the illness of this leading figure. Only in October, when everything in the farmhouse is long over and done with and Netty is living there alone with her silent daughter, will the man from Hengelo be caught through the agency of other people and shot after a few days. Even then, however, it won’t have become clear exactly how many fugitives from Twente and Salland found their way to Limburg and from there through untraceable channels to Nancy, then on to the south of France.
“So we’ll go via Beckum,” she says now.
And Gerard nods. They’re talking about the shortest route and how and where they can attract as little attention as possible.
“Yes,” he says. “Just after the crossroads you can take the back roads across the heath.”
“I’ve got it.” She brings her face close to the army map in front of them. She scratches her chin. “Fine,” she says softly. “And then?”
Gerard looks from her to the two others. “We’ll keep to the sandy road, then the canal.” He thinks for a moment, drums with his fingers on the map. “I think it’s best if we take the Wiekbrug.”
“Seems good to me.” The policeman coughs, he can feel a dryness in his throat. Reaching for the packet of cigarettes on the table, he says, “It comes out onto the Hengelo road. It’s a minute from there.”
He opens the packet with a deft movement and offers it to the others. Gerard is still smoking, Jannosch accepts, and Nicolien Nieboer, who ordinarily is someone who prefers to stay healthy, reckons that this evening she mustn’t refuse. ”
Thanks.”
Does she feel that ashtrays and cigarette butts are part of the props of danger? That the sharp taste in the nose and throat combine excellently with the sharpness of disobedience and that the smell and the smoke, which drifts blindly in all directions, are perfectly compatible with the craziness, the silent triumph of going your own way in the face of all the regulations? She sits in the smoke-filled den of the kitchen. Can you picture it? We can assume that, inhaling treacherously, she can in her mind’s eye picture what battlehanded combat troops can expect as recompense for the mortal danger they endure; the reward coupons in each pack of cigarettes — sometimes five or
six per man.
The light in the kitchen is pretty hazy. The smoke is so thick that the black blind in front of the windows has taken on a look that, if not celestial, is at least bluish and transparent. A silence falls. There’s a short moment of complete peace in which none of the three men can imagine himself standing one day like a begging dog watching a smoke ring curling clandestinely from under a table. Nevertheless, this will happen. Nevertheless, within the foreseeable future, they will see tobacco no longer as a compensation but as a gift from the gods. A cigarette stub, a few puffs on a pipe as a safe-conduct that allows you to have your thoughts transported from the avenue through the camp to the beautiful moonlight above the parade ground. Another world, unimaginable as yet, and Jannosch will tug a Polish fellow prisoner by the arm and lure him with gestures into a corner in Block 34. A quick look around. Then he opens his hand and shows the Pole a block of margarine. “Dm,” says the Pole. Jannosch knows the black market prices too. Impudently he says, “Fiinf.” A block of fat has a new owner, a dim Pole who doesn’t realize that for five cigarettes he could have got a good hunk of bread too.
“Oh, thank you,” she says again, emphatically, as the ashtray is pushed toward her.
A little longer. Gerard looks at his watch. From the farmhouse just outside Benckelo to the municipal offices in Delden it’s about twenty minutes by car.
Those twenty minutes haven’t started yet.
“Shall we have a quick one?”
He and Jannosch are used to having a stiff drink of something shordy before a job. This evening is no exception.
Weapons, gloves, sacks to put the loot in, rope. The coming hour is gone over once again in three heads. But what’s relevant is what’s going on in the fourth one: They must have left the Dienststelle in Enschede half an hour ago, she thinks to herself.
Then there’s the fraction of a second that has already been mentioned, is already known about and could be passed over now. No, listen. All of them have shot up from the table. As Gerard turns away with a furious leap, he meets the eyes of Nicolien Nieboer. Is one ever aware of what is happening in one’s life? In a single look there’s occasionally a sharp knife with which you can cut something loose from the world. His heart contracts. Not now, but many months later he will observe with revealing clarity how those eyes darted from the windows back to the table and went around, from one to the other. When they crossed his he caught something of a speechless, very strange pleasure.
I’d like to know if she listened that time. Nothing could be read from her face except the instructions to fill Kilner jars a quarter full with berries and sugar. Then I saw her feel in her apron pocket again and, sure enough, bring out black French cigarettes and a lighter. At the stone table under the linden trees, under the August sky, Lucie was busy with the first phase of preparing blueberry gin. As she did so she cast the occasional glance at her father, who’d sat down near her. The not very talkative Gerard obviously felt a need to express himself that afternoon. His words had flowed on for quite a while. I think that his daughter was listening, but I’m not sure to whom exactly she was listening. With a Gitane in the corner of her mouth, she poured sugar through a funnel and the only thing she felt was an inexpressible longing.
She’d been talking a lot that summer about an Appaloosa.
Gerard had of course noticed something of his daughter’s autumnal mood. For months she’d been getting up at five o’clock to exercise the top horses Linda, Walton Beauty, and Viking in turn over the ripe and tall fields. She also looked after the broodmares together with the stable boy, and the one- and two-year-olds and her husband’s favorite, Bellaheleen, the prize winner. So why did she need a tiger horse as well? More than once, when they were sitting having coffee at around nine-thirty in the morning, Gerard heard her holding forth in a kind of intoxicated rhapsody about the light undercoat of an American purebred, with a pattern of yellow or brown patches on its head and body.
At other moments, he found her very silent. She would be feeding the geese, and when he asked her something, she didn’t necessarily give him an answer that made sense. How was he to know that in this heat, with a glazed look, as if she’d been switched off, under the brim of a sun hat, she had already tuned her ears completely to the winter season? In the garden the tomatoes rotted on the vines. Insects buzzed among the trees. The moments became more and more numerous when nothing existed for her except that one compelling voice. The voice that on winter evenings told her things she couldn’t always fully understand. Gerard had sat down opposite her at the terrace table. I can imagine that the slight air of madness hanging around his daughter infected not only me but him too. The atmosphere of messages from afar. The concerns, mythological in scope, of a very present absent person. The scope of the story is that it attracts related stories to it. Gerard looked at the busy woman’s hands and began talking about the past.
More than thirty-five years ago. January 1944. Himself and an ex-policeman and a Gypsy. The awareness of having fallen into a trap in his own house. The traitor was Mrs. Nicolien Nieboer-Ploeg, who seemed helpful and had once sent her little son to him on his bike with the message that they would be looking for somebody in hiding here or there. He still remembered the attraction of resistance operations, the sense that you’d actually been made for them. The Gypsy called himself Jannosch Franz. You never know the real names of those people. Jannosch Franz was a crafty man who knew every area, every country road from here to the Belgium-France border. At the age of thirty-one he already had a family of three children and a fourth on the way. Gerard had occasionally been inside that caravan. Dark faces. An icon cabinet with saints behind glass. Of the three of them he was the only one not to return after the liberation.
With an imperturbable expression Lucie was cutting out squares of cellophane. What was she thinking about as she put them over the Kilner jars and pulled them taut with a red rubber band? Something precious? Shall we say an Ap- paloosa? A mystery about which her heart wanted to know everything, now that another mystery was still wandering through Central Europe and for the time being was giving no sign of life? Gerard put his cigar on the edge of the table and talked about a missing resistance fighter. A strange guy with an unmistakable accent, illiterate. Who did she think of when Gerard told her that only after the fight on that last evening had he seen him without his black moleskin hat? God knows, but it may be that this daughter’s heart is shrewder than her head.
The jars were done. Lucie got up to put them away in a warm place indoors; after about ten days, when the sugar had melted, she would fill them to the brim with young gin. Gerard took one in each hand too.
“That son of his,” he said, “he sometimes brought him here. A lad of six or seven.”
2
I was born at night during a snowstorm. My mother was lying under a caravan in the Dutch part of the woods between Nijmegen and Cleves. Those caravans have high wheels. My mother had crawled underneath with an aunt and a sister-in-law after the side where the wind was howling had been covered with branches and rags. I wasn’t long in coming. “A son!” cried the aunt and the sister-in-law. As the snowflakes swirled past, my mother held me tight. She whispered a name in my ear that she would never repeat to a living soul. Not long afterward she straightened her back, with me tucked in the warmth of her woolen cardigan. She smoothed her three or four skirts and clambered back inside, to her warm goose-down quilt. And how she slept!
That’s how it went, when the southeast comer below Nijmegen had been turned into a winter tundra. My family wanted to lie very low for a while, do a bit of trading with the farmers, just enough to buy food and fodder. It was too cold for anything else. When it’s cold you don’t want too many strange faces around, you prefer a little peace. The rotten thing is that that day at the crack of dawn, at about half past seven, ten gendarmes cut through the pristine white wood on bikes. They found three snowed-in caravans and horses under a stretched piece of oilskin.
May those bloodhounds
be thoroughly cursed by their offspring! May they catch the raging scabies!
My father hurriedly slipped his shoes on, cursing all the while, but assumed a polite expression when he told them as he handed over his papers that a son had been born that night, whom he wanted to register according to the rules at the town hall and have entered under his lawful name in the records. There is a kind of inconvenience that barks — checks, swearing, we don’t make a fuss about that — and there is inconvenience that bites. My family had to leave there and then. Under the strict supervision of ten cyclists my family went back to the border post where it had been let through a few days before.
How old was I then? Ten hours, perhaps.
And less than a week later I was back in the land of my birth, because what’s a border? Moonlight, and a cart track. Shadows past a shadow. With the aid of a passport carefully selected by my father, I have since then been known as Joseph Plato, son of Jan Andrias Plato and Gisela Nanna Demestre.
My parents: impossible to know the course of their lives. And yet I feel a longing that looks and listens, quite separate from the ordinary things that happen. You can’t explain it.
From my father I know that he had five brothers, four sisters, fourteen male and sixteen female cousins. They’d been born in Russia, Transylvania, Croatia, Germany, Scandinavia, or Holland. Some of them were in possession of a very precious local passport. My father was a skinny, muscular chap who could swear fantastically without any malice, I loved to listen to him. He, his brothers, and his cousins were blacksmiths and horse dealers, and when they were asked on Saturday to come to the pub in the evening with their violins, or to a farmer’s barn, they would negotiate a price and then give a whole spectacle including the number with a dagger tucked in their boots. I heard and saw that musical rumpus on my mother’s lap. You don’t forget things like that.
Duke of Egypt Page 15