River in the Sea (32 page)

If she had helped her hide her beau, would Minne have gone into hiding too? What was Minne gaining through him? Surely today, she had only lost. Leen pushed too much grain through the funnel, causing it to sputter. She threw the press at her feet, kicking it away, knowing they’d hear the clatter in the house. If Pater was returning, wouldn’t he be home by now?

The worst was the singing, the familiar lines of the anthem caught in her head.
Frisian blood, rise up! Foam, boil, and thud in our veins.
The song echoed in Leen’s ears, and she couldn’t help it. Picking up the press again, she hummed the tune as she took another funnel of grain. Later, in bed, her fingertips throbbing, Minne’s voice kept her from sleep.

21.

Just before noon on a Friday, Issac ran into the kitchen from the barn, uniformed and sweating, and said quickly, “I’m leaving. We’re watching the final retreat.” He told them how the Germans had tried one last time to take the north coast, but together the L.O. and the Canadians had quelled the attack in less than an hour. They’d even captured a German officer and four men. He’d been there, seen it all, he said.

“Isn’t it over now?” Leen asked. She, Tine, and Mem were at the table, picking through a basket of new peas, breaking off the tips. 

“No more fighting?” Tine added.

“Close. And no, no more fighting. We’re just patrolling the retreat. I don’t know when I’ll be back, a day, two maybe?” Just before he ran out the door, Issac tucked an unwrapped pack of cigarettes into Leen’s hand. Real cigarettes, not a pouch of tobacco with papers, but formed in a factory, even and perfect.

“Thank you,” Leen said, genuinely surprised. She sniffed the rectangle. Even through the foil she could smell the heady, rich scent. “Thank you–”

But he was already through the door. Over his shoulder, he called out, “May 4! Remember the date!”

Until now Mem had not said anything. But hearing Issac, she said, “So it is May already,” her quiet tone a cross between wistful and pleading. “May already.”

“When we wake up tomorrow morning, the Germans will be totally gone,” Mrs. Boonstra said. “Can you believe it?” 

They had just finished a late lunch of bread, cheese, and a bowl of sliced beets, followed by black tea, and even with the meager portions, Leen could barely finish her cup. She did not have an appetite. She did not feel like conversation either. Since the day of the head–shaving Leen had been constantly talking to herself, repeating a kind of desperate rosary, listing her sins: the dog, her missing father, the words to her mother and brother, her continued friendship with Minne even when there had been suspicion. No one could say they saw Leen with a soldier. Yet they had seen the lipstick, they had seen her smoking. Before that, there was everything else. The driving, the working outside. The items formed a catalog of transgressions. She wiped her mouth and her fingers came away fuchsia, stained from the beets.

The last time they had gathered like this was before the Canadians had come through, and the words had all been said so many times they had lost their meaning. But this was It, now, nothing more could happen except the
end
. The L.O were on the dike, watching the Germans exit the islands, making sure no stray soldiers tried to defect or worse, stage another fight. Blaskowitz was close to signing the surrender papers, now that the German army had been defeated. They learned this while listening to the radio again with Mrs. Boonstra, who had invited them over to keep company together while her husband was out, patrolling with Issac and the rest of the Resistance, their last organized effort. 

No one responded to Mrs. Boonstra; there was too much to listen to. The Queen herself was due to address the nation, and the radio voices were animated, like they were at the beginning of the war, this time shouting about the food drops. Operation Manna, it was called. Many of the planes that flew over Friesland, coming over the North Sea, were for that now. They dropped sacks of food in Holland, although very little was dropped in Friesland. Leen thought of how she had stolen, how she had gone to Jakob. She hadn’t seen him in days. All those empty cellar shelves. Another to the list. She should’ve asked Issac. So much could have been avoided if she’d spoken at the right time, clammed up at others. How easy it was to say to Mem the one thing she didn’t want to hear – what none of them wanted to hear – but yet she had been paralyzed to go to her brother and ask him for food. She’d wanted to hide from Issac, but Mem? She was split, broken into pieces. 

“What’s the matter there, Leentje?” Mrs. Boonstra asked. “You seem so sad.”

Leen rearranged herself on her chair. “Nothing. Just thinking.”

“Well, whatever it is, push it away!” she said. “With our breakfast coffee it’s over. For good. Now, let’s make some soup, hm?  That sounds
lekker
to me. Put it on early for the best taste. Some
bolle
, some cheese, some soup. A nice dinner. We still must eat,
ja
?”

Leen was in charge of making the meatballs. She worked quickly as she rolled clumps of ground beef between her palms into uniform balls, collecting a little pile until the beef was gone. She finished in the few minutes it took the water to reach a boil, sending bits of chopped onion to the surface and then back down to the bottom of the pot, and just as Mrs. Boonstra took the plate of meatballs and dropped them into the hot broth Mr. Boonstra walked in.

Mrs. Boonstra rushed to him with a smile, asking, “Is it over? Are they all surrendered?” but her words and smile faded out as fast as they had formed, like the steam of a handprint on glass. Standing at the doorway he looked like winter.

Leen sat down. She braced for the words, expecting them to hit her like a punch. Pater, dead. Confirmed. Finally. 

Mr. Boonstra began to cry before he spoke. He slapped himself lightly, right across the cheek, to gain enough composure to speak the words. Leen felt the spike of emotion in her chest, traveling above her heart to her collarbone. This was no false alarm, no Minne at the door. 

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Issac, something’s happened to Issac.”

“What?” Mrs. Boonstra asked. She was the only one to respond. Leen was still trying to convince herself that he had said Issac. Issac, not Pater.

He spoke fast, gesturing to no one. “We’d dug some foxholes into the side of the dike, down near Ee. There was a group of soldiers moving out and they looked suspicious. Moving too slow. And Issac popped his head up, to take a look, and there was a sniper. We never saw him. He was hidden on a roof, laying there, watching us the whole time.” He paused to take a breath. He shut his eyes tightly. “He got Issac. He shot him. He’s dead. I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

Leen heard gasp after gasp and she blinked once, again, more, more, again, staring at Mr. Boonstra. His words stunned her, everyone, and she could not say anything because suddenly she was convinced she was dreaming and that none of this was real. The only thing she knew was true was the spike of fear in her chest. It had turned into a spear.

The air broke open. There was a bellowing, so deep and so low that Leen thought it was an animal.

It was Mem.

When Leen found herself with the wind hard on her face and the light lowering over the water, she finally understood where she was. But how long had it been now, a half hour? Ten minutes? Sixty?  No. It couldn’t have been long since Mr. Boonstra told them that Issac had been shot, saying with the deepest, most painful regret in his voice that her brother had been shot in the head, killed instantly. Yet all she could see were the images of Tine’s white face, Mem’s gaping, howling mouth, of Renske asking, “What? What?” over and over again, as if they were far in the past. It was like she had seen it all as a witness. She had watched it through a veil that separated her from her family falling apart all around her, Mr. Boonstra covering his face with his large hand to hide that he was crying, and Mrs. Boonstra rushing to Mem and cupping her face and holding her by the shoulders, repeating something in a voice meant to be soothing but instead far too high–pitched. 

Leen understood that her memories, that scene she could not erase, was real. But that was separate from Issac’s death. Which is why she needed to see it. So she’d gotten up, without saying a word, and left, pulling a coat off a hook by the door and slipping it on. The sleeves were far too long and it hung on her. She’d give it back to Mr. Boonstra later and then of all things she thought of Maatje and her blouse, how she’d had nothing she could use to cover up. Once outside Leen thought, it’s not even very cold. But she kept the coat on. She heard the door clicking shut behind her, a silence after the sounds of crying, words, exhales and inhales, yells. No one stopped her or called her name.

Walking on the dike, Leen watched her feet move, each step forward a step towards Ee. How did they know to keep moving?  Her feet were in command of her; the rest of her following. She hugged the coat around her and kept the sleeves long, covering her hands. The nighttime cold was sliding in, a layer at a time, but it felt good; right. 

She walked.

Would he be there? What happened to bodies?  Leen didn’t know. Where was Pater’s? What if they had to bury two bodies? She wiped her face. She tried to remember about Wopke. He had been kept cold, that much she remembered. Cold, ice cold. The wind blew on her face and on her neck and swam around her ankles and it could have been that night in October, that third Saturday. Wopke had been buried fast. He hadn’t looked good and so he’d been covered. The casket was always cold. Leen had wanted to see her brother but she only had to ask once to be told no and her answer was watching Pater’s face twist into something she’d never seen before. He looked like she had hit him or pierced the soft spot underneath a callous, and he’d told her plainly, “
Nee
,
poppie
, you don’t want to see your brother.” And he’d walked away and Leen had wanted to ask why. It took her years to understand Pater’s answer, not until after the airmen had washed up out of the North Sea three years later, laying twenty feet from the shoreline, uncovered by the water. Three pilots, two Canadian and one English, had been shot down and drifted to the Frisian shore, an unlikely burial place. When they’d been found Leen had stood with Mem and her sisters while Issac followed Pater, who, along with other men, crowded around the bodies and wrapped them hurriedly in blankets before rushing them onto the back of a truck. As they deposited the last corpse, the blanket around his feet came loose, showing pale, puffy skin interrupted by pockets of pink. Mem covered Renske’s eyes with her hand but Leen saw everything. Later Leen heard that two of the men still had their tags, but the third didn’t, and he was so badly decomposed that he was buried only with the epitaph: “Known Unto God.” 

That was before, though, when she’d been little, when Mem tried to cover her eyes too. She had to see Issac. She wanted to see the foxhole, she wanted to see his body slumped, she wanted to know for sure. She needed facts, blood, bone, skin, muscle. She could handle the blood. She’d seen blood on Jan Fokke’s face and blood on her skirt and blood on a dog she’d killed herself and she’d seen pollen worked into fabric from two bodies pressed close and it all was the same now. Everything about the faces in Mrs. Boonstra’s kitchen looked like they could float right out of her mind, just drift away and she’d never remember, and it’d be a shock to think that yes, her brother Issac was dead. Too. She’d have to say that,
both my brothers, they are gone
. One killed before the war, one killed at the end of it. Frames. Like bookends, far too neat. Borders, on a map. And Pater?

She walked, her feet getting heavier but her pace still fast. The sounds in Mrs. Boonstra’s house, those would not float away. She would always hear Mr. Boonstra’s voice: “He got Issac.”

She kept walking towards Ee.

She didn’t know what to look for. The foxhole would be hidden, obviously. She might not be able to see it from the path on top of the dike. She stopped and looked around. Would a sniper shoot her too?  She didn’t think so. She wasn’t wearing a uniform. She was a girl. A young woman. It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t kill her. They’d do something else.

From the top of the dike she could see the edges of the islands, where the Germans had just been. She could see the tops of roofs, smoke from chimneys trailing softly into the gray sky. No one was out. Everyone was inside or elsewhere or hiding from her. The world was quiet except for the water and the wind and her breath and the occasional sound of her
klompen
knocking together. They made a dull clunk and it reminded her of a church bell.

They would ring bells for him, she thought. They would ring bells for Issac. What would the burial be like, since he was Resistance?  Now that the war was over the funeral might be something. It might really be something.

She shook her head hard, like a bee had flown by and scared her. She wanted to rid herself of the thought and the image. First, the foxhole, she thought.
That’s all I want to see right now
.

Ee. How far away was Ee?  Seven kilometers?  Eight, maybe nine?  Was she going the right way?  Leen wasn’t sure, and she should’ve stopped to think, to review in her mind. She’d simply set out walking. She kept up her pace, barely forming the thoughts before she convinced herself that she was not heading the wrong way to Ternaard. Did Mr. Deinum know? He’d liked Issac. Had he been there, too? Was Klaus, his son, back? Yes, she’d gone the other, correct way instead. East. If she turned around to look she’d see the church steeple behind her. It was visible a long way off, a tiny point. The sunset hid behind clouds. 

There was another set of footsteps. If it was Mr. Boonstra she knew she could outrun him. It wouldn’t be long before she was there. She saw a new steeple in the distance and that was probably it. Ee’s church. Once she was close she’d start climbing down the dike and she’d look for it there.