River in the Sea (12 page)

Hearing Leen, Mem sat up suddenly. “What time is it,” she said.

“Seven.”

Mem nodded. Then her face changed. Her eyes widened and her chin folded inwards and her shoulders began to shake and tears ran down the tops of her cheeks into the lines of her mouth.

Leen didn’t know what to say. She looked around the kitchen, helpless. Nothing had changed from the night before. The dishes were stacked, the stove was unlit. There was no bread laid out for breakfast, nothing. The entire room was cold.

“Where is Pater,” Leen said. Her panic rose immediately. “Mem, where is
ús heit
?”

Mem shook her head. “Last night,” she said, then nothing more.

Leen sat down across from her mother. She stared at the bare table. She looked at Mem’s wet face and thought of the stacks of meat, the late night, the slices of bread, all of it wrapped up, ready to be stored. Or, ready to be packed, taken.

In an instant, she understood.

8.

The dinghy made no sound as Leen used the cracked wooden oar to push off, causing small crests of dark water to lap softly against the canal’s edge. Ice was forming along the bank, quickly becoming brown and dirty as it slowly encroached on the withered and rotting grasses. Soon the canal would be frozen over completely. There would be skating; there always was. But the number of skaters would be sparse, maybe mothers with small children, a few boys under twelve. Certainly no men under fifty to link arms with their giggling wives to relive their days of courtship. Without the teenaged boys chasing each other, the teenaged girls would opt to stay home. Leen had always liked to skate. She was a slow starter, never fast off the line in a race, but once her legs grew warm, she could go on and on, and sometimes she did, skating past Ternaard and back.

She dug the oar into the canal bottom and pushed again. A gust of wind blew, blowing a fine snow across her cheeks, and another degree of lightness in the sky told her yes, morning was coming, and no, she would not be skating this year, not as long as Pater was gone.

Leen hadn’t asked Mr. Boonstra for the use of his small boat. She didn’t think it polite to wake him up before six a.m., on a dark early December morning. Then again, it wasn’t polite to take his
lytse
boat without asking. But Leen also couldn’t imagine going straight home, not after last night, and still stiff with the need for sleep and the smell of hay mingling with the oil of her skin. She could not get rid of the odor, and she hoped that the hard wind of the Sea might dilute it, along with the smoke from the cigarette Jakob had given her that she planned to have once she got further out on the canal.

Before the war, she used to take the dinghy out in the summers, escaping after the evening meal to evade the dinner dishes Mem had declared Leen’s responsibility. Breathless from her bolt, Leen would row onto the shallow water, letting the current push her wherever it would take her. Sometimes, in between houses, she would see Mem stalking her, calling her name. “You come home right now!” she’d yell. Leen would answer, “Just as soon as Tine does the dishes!” It rarely worked. The dishes waited for her, stacked, scraped, but still unwashed. But it didn’t matter. Leen liked to be alone on the water, one of the few times she enjoyed solitude.

She felt for the cigarette behind her ear. This time, the tip was moist from her own skin, but it still made her flush. She lit it with the matches she kept in her pocket. Anticipating the heat, Leen drew in deeply, but the warmth did not live up to her expectations. She needed real fire, something hot enough to cauterize the raw edges of her nerves before she had to drag the dinghy back against the current, wind the rope back around the peeling wooden post behind the Boonstra’s shed, and quickly trudge home. But not yet. Not yet. She imagined rowing through the shallow water until the canal met the ocean, where she would join the rivers in the sea Pater once described to her, explaining the tunnels under the ocean’s surface that could carry you out, borderless canals strung along the seafloor. Submarines used them, Pater had said; they were like a secret web that moved out of the North Sea to England and beyond. But as far as Leen could tell, the canals simply wound through the country, ending and beginning nowhere, never connecting to the world, blocked off by the ever–present green band of the dike.

When he left, Pater had probably not traveled through those rivers. According to Mem, Pater said two weeks, maybe three; that was all the war had left in it, and that determined how long he would be in hiding. Mr. Deinum had told her, there’ll be Canadians on your doorstep any day now. She remembered his words exactly.

It was fourteen days since Pater had left. It was thirteen days since Leen went
underdoek
. And on this cold morning, searching for a glimpse of her dark house between the brick walls of her neighbors’ homes, Leen wondered, not quite allowing herself to hope, if this would be the day he came home.

Leen had secretly believed that going
underdoek
was exciting. She could never be part of the official Resistance, never wear the L.O. uniform of blue coveralls with a white band encircling the arm, and while it wasn’t romantic, it was close. And even though she had always understood going underground to be necessary and dangerous, in her mind, the intrigue of the label automatically elevated the status of anyone who needed to go into hiding, even her brother.

Despite not being part of the L.O., Issac slept
underdoek
often. It was common for boys and young men to sleep in different barns among the villages, never the same place two nights in a row. Leen had always imagined that groups of boys met and played games, perhaps cards or
blokjes
like the old men in the café, and smoked and stayed up by dim lantern light, laughing and punching each other when the jokes turned a little mean, then laughing again without grudges or sullenness, not the way of girls. Perhaps the farmer’s or fishermen’s wife would bring out chunks of steaming fried fish and mugs of coffee and slices of creamy, sharp gouda. If a
razzia
warning was given, everyone would deftly cover themselves, eliminating all traces of their existence in maneuvers practiced to remove critical seconds. In moments, it would appear as if they had never been there, all the while their hot breath  contained under piles of hay and false wooden partitions.

But when she asked Issac, after he first began sleeping elsewhere, if he saw any of his friends the nights he slept underground, he’d scoffed and said, “Why would I do that? The more of us together, the more they can take away at once. Don’t be foolish.”

Now Leen knew for herself. It was lonely, cold, uncomfortable. Except for the night before, she had never met up with anyone she knew.

She’d done as Mem had instructed and gone directly to the Feikema barn without going to the house first to tell them she was there. The Feikemas lived on the opposite side of Wierum, not far from the church and the café. Their barn was even tidier and more organized than the De Graaf’s, tools hung on clean hooks, stalls cleared and dirt floors swept smooth. But that didn’t prevent the drafts that snaked through the boards, the dampness that seeped in through the roof that needed thatching, the hardness of the wooden platform and the blunt edges of the hay that poked her skin, no matter how carefully she arranged the quilts she’d taken with her.

When she opened the barn door, it was dark, except for a single candle in the loft throwing off just enough light to outline a boy’s dark hair.

The candle was snuffed out so quickly Leen thought she might have imagined it. Then she heard her name. “Leen? Is that you?” and the candle was relit, the bright flame revealing Jakob Hoffman’s face.

“Sorry,” he said, “you gave my heart quite a shock.”

Leen blinked, still caught in the surprise. She put her hand on her thumping heart. She was glad he had called to her; if he hadn’t, she wasn’t sure what she would have done, or where she would’ve gone, because she would have been too scared to call out, “Who’s there?”

“Close the door,” Jakob said, his voice rising a note.

“Sorry,” Leen said, quickly closing it and latching it from the inside. They stared at each other through the flickering of the candle, its light glinting through the glass holder.

“There’s no room at the inn,” Leen said, still standing by the door.

At first Jakob looked puzzled at what she said, but then he laughed, a little falsely, Leen thought. “The Feikema’s are booked full tonight,” he said. “No vacancy.”

“Should I go?” Leen asked. “We probably shouldn’t… you know…” She didn’t know how to say it, even though the circumstances were innocent. Still, even the emergency of
underdoeking
didn’t prevent the segregation of the younger sexes during nighttime hours. God’s rules were firm.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” Jakob said, shrugging. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go back out again.”

Leen paused. Pater’s last set of instructions to all of the children, delivered via Mem, were to stay out of trouble and keep a low profile, an extension of his early caution to her –
Let’s keep it quiet, okay
? At home, the hush was unbearable. She was hardly there anymore, between the Deinum’s and the nights spent in frigid barns, but in the few hours home, the silence made it hard to even move. Although she had no eloquent words selected to speak how she never meant to cause Pater to go into hiding, how she had no idea what she would bring upon them, she still felt them balling in her throat. No matter what Mem put out for meals, the words made it difficult to swallow and the food grew dry and mushy and had no taste, and it took glasses of water and milk to get it down. But if she asked for more milk or for someone to pass a plate, she felt greedy, afraid of diverting more scrutiny on herself. So she kept quiet. They all did, saying nothing about their sadness, or their anger, or the palpable fear, except for Renske, who asked every night in a tremulous voice, “When is Pater coming home?”

Even in the dim light Leen could see Jakob’s eyes studying her, asking the same thing that Leen was wondering: now that we’re both here, what now?

He seemed to read her mind. “You’ve got to sleep somewhere. Come on. I’ll sleep at the other end.” He pointed towards a spot several meters away from where he was. 

She climbed the ladder, swung her knapsack onto the platform and started to crawl across the loft. Suddenly, knowing he was watching, her movements felt awkward and clumsy, and the noise of the hay crushed under her knees was thunderous. Inexplicably her fingertips started to tingle. She flipped on her backside and tried to scoot herself to a nearby spot, not too close, but not too far away. It was warmest near the candle.

Through the wavering light, Jakob smiled at her shyly. “Do you want a cigarette?”

“Please,” Leen said. A smoke would calm her nerves, offering her minutes and the warm buzz to relax. Jakob lit one for her, then passed it. The tip of the cigarette was wet where his lips had been, and she flushed. Thankfully it was still dim, although her eyes adjusted enough that she could see his face in detail. He had a pimple on his chin, a small one but quite red, and if Mem could see it, she would go after it, her hands always ready for popping
poekels
. Noticing Jakob’s blemishes didn’t distract her from also noticing his hair, the one thing she could never dismiss about him. Leen reached up and pretended to itch her temple, checking her skin. She tried to quickly smooth down her hair. Her lack of motivation for grooming had only grown, but she’d been lucky so far, her skin staying clear, but she hadn’t taken a brush through her coarse hair since the morning, and it was a given that her hands were dirty. She needed a fresh change of clothes, and she probably smelled from her underarms. She started to pick at a ragged edge of a fingernail, then stuffed her free hand under her thigh and took a deep drag.

Sitting with Jakob in the Feikema’s loft, both of them blowing smoke away from each other’s faces, was at once completely alien and strangely comfortable. He was being kind to her, and it felt soothing. Yet it was still odd to find him there. Leen sat up straight. “Jakob, why are you here in the first place? There’s no round–up, is there? Is a
razzia
coming?” Maybe in her hurry to get to the barn through the darkness, she missed the signal. She thought of Mem.

Jakob shook his head. “
Nee
, I’d know about that. I’m always
underdoek
now.” Before Leen could ask him anything more about it, he asked, “Any news about your father?”

Leen was too shocked to answer this.

Jakob must have read the confusion on her face. “I know he’s gone into hiding. Have you heard anything from him? Messages? Notes?”

“How do you know he’s in hiding?” Leen asked, immediately angry at herself for saying the word aloud. She herself barely knew anything about Pater’s departure, much less his current whereabouts, and she wouldn’t know more until he returned. Yet it was all she thought about.