River in the Sea (33 page)

How much blood?  His face would be covered with it. Her heart began to race. She let out a whimper. They would keep him cold, ice his body down before it was time. If Renske asked she would let her see him, no matter what, she thought. Renske shouldn’t have to wonder. She hadn’t seen the airmen. This was her brother. She would need to know. She’d want to know how he died.

The hand grasped her shoulder but she didn’t jump. The footsteps had been getting closer to her but she never planned on turning around. If it was a soldier, if it was an old woman, she didn’t care. Leen stopped and the person took two more steps. 

“Leen.” It was Jakob. 

His face was red all over. His eyes looked smaller, tired. “Is he still there?” she demanded. “I want to go there. I want to see it.” He blinked at her and said nothing. “Do you understand me? I want to see where it happened, I want to see the foxhole. I want to see my
broer
.”

Jakob nodded. “He’s not there now, but I can take you to it. And then I have to bring you home.”

Leen turned and resumed walking. He walked next to her now, his posture hunched over and his hands in his pockets and Leen crossed her arms over her chest again, pressing against the lining of the coat sleeves. 

Only a few minutes passed before Jakob took her elbow and said, “Here,” leading her off the path. Leen started to slip on the dry grass so Jakob said, “Go sideways,” and she did, and they walked ten more meters, going forward and down and then Jakob said, “There.”

She had not really thought of what a foxhole would look like and so when she saw it, all she could think was,
It’s just a hole
. A stupid hole in the ground. She must’ve said it aloud.

“See how it’s dug,” Jakob said, pointing. He was educational, explanatory, and that was exactly what Leen wanted. No one else would give her the details, and this was something she had to know. “You dig it into the side and you can lean into it. It doesn’t go straight down.” 

She noticed what he said but she was already past it. She was looking at the grass all around it, or what grass there was left. Even though it was dusk now she saw how much the grass was flattened, by bodies, feet, shovels. There had been activity there. There had been men there, several. Issac was only one of them. That day, that same day he’d been there, his heart beating, his brow intact. Earlier that day, he was alive. He’d given her cigarettes, a whole pack. He’d been so excited at the commotion and he’d said no more fighting and he’d given her an entire pack.

Dark. Between the grass it was so dark but it was mud, it was dirt. She couldn’t see any blood.

“I need to take you home now,” Jakob said. “Come on, you should go home.”

Leen stared. That was it. This strange hole dug into the side of the dike, that was where her brother had been shot.

“It’s so small,” she said. “How did he fit in it?”

“You’re meant to lean,” Jakob said. “We had to dig it quickly, anyway. So you just fit your side into it. Knee and shoulder.”

She took a step forward.

“Come on,” Jakob said. “Let me take you home.”

Leen looked at him.

“Was there blood?” But she didn’t wait for the answer. More steps and bending down and she was in it. Up close she saw small clumps of dirt and grass, a distinct footprint. She leaned her head against the ground. It was cold against her face, like the wind scraping across the back of her neck. She had hoped it would still be warm from his body.

Jakob was telling her that she should go, please let him take her home. Leen adjusted herself and she fit, she fit right in the spot, knee and shoulder, just as he said. She pressed her head against the mud and grass and behind her was the entire sea. All that water, all those underwater rivers. She took a breath and pushed a sleeve up and put her hand flat on the grass and this was when she first cried. She cried from high in her throat, from the space behind her nose and eyes. She knew there was more, so much more left, but it was not ready to be exhumed. Not yet.

Jakob moved closer and she was prepared to fight him off, to punch and claw at his face, if he tried to move her. But instead he sat down, to her side and behind so she couldn’t see him. He was silent and that was good. She cried and made all the terrible sounds she’d been holding in. She didn’t care if Jakob heard. The bellowing that she heard now, rolling out over the water, over the wind, it was her own.

22.

Leen answered the door only to find no one there, again, but wrapped inside a tea towel were two jars of canned beans, a loaf of warm bread, and fried fish. Someone else had brought by breakfast, and there’d be more for dinner, food just like the kind they ate at home, except the flavor was always a note different, accounting for different pans and hands. No one ever waited from the sidewalk to see if she or Tine retrieved the food from the doorstep, and Leen never found a note saying where to return the plates and platters. But that didn’t matter. They’d wash the dinnerware, rinsing twice, and leave them on the counter during the after–funeral gathering. At the end of the night each piece would be gone, taken by its rightful owner. There was no need for any formal thank you. It was just how things were done.

She stared at the kitchen counter. Her shirt was untucked and her legs bare underneath her skirt. Her lips were cracked along the inside edge and the bottoms of her feet were brown with dust from the unswept floor. Her knee ached even though the scrapes had fallen away, leaving behind new, fragile skin, and the bruises had completely faded.

She decided she should open the jar of beans and eat straight from it, using no plate, just a fork, warmed slightly from the bread. She wasn’t hungry and even though she’d smoked too much already, hand–rolling one after the other to keep intact the pack Issac had given her, she wanted another. She uncapped the jar and took a forkful, quelling the craving to smoke to avoid another connection to Issac, of the quiet upstairs except for the shock of Mem’s wails, of how when she’d last seen Renske that morning her baby sister looked at her and asked, “How many more days until the funeral?” 

“Two,” Leen answered. 

“How many days has he been dead?”

“Two.” 

And that was all Renske had asked. She ate her oatmeal, plain, with no fruit or milk, thinning it with fat tears that dropped with every bite.

Today, May 6, the surrender papers were finally signed, dated for the 5th. Today was the end of the war. Issac would be buried the 8th. They couldn’t wait any longer. The bodies were kept cold but even then, the inevitable decay set in, you could see a change. It was time. They hadn’t waited that long for Wopke.

Leen shut her eyes, trying to stop her thoughts. Maybe she should eat a piece of fish, its greasy coating already sliding off.
You need to eat,
she told herself.
Someone in this house has to eat
. The door opened, the door where the food was dropped off, the door only polite company and soldiers knocked on. Leen didn’t bother looking up. It was probably Mrs. Boonstra again. Lately whenever Leen saw her neighbor she had pins in her mouth. She had looked in their meager closets and said, her tone soft, that they needed new clothes for the funeral. It was for a Resistance man, she said. She took items out of their closets and pinned away inches from the bodice of Mem’s best dress. Yesterday, on her way out, she slung over her arm days’ of ironing from the laundry pile that had not moved from the kitchen table since that horrendous afternoon.

The footsteps crossed the threshold and then stopped. They were far too tentative to be Mrs. Boonstra. Minne? Leen turned. She blinked once, then again. She had never seen a man look so forlorn.

“
Poppie
,” Pater said. 

Leen stopped breathing, holding her breath until her chest heaved into a sob. “Oh,” she said. She covered her mouth. “Oh!” she gasped. The air exited her lungs and nose in serrated gasps. All this time she’d imagined shouting and running and leaping and doors blasting open and feet pounding down the stairs but now all she could do was walk gracelessly to her father to burrow her head into his chest, her head weaving in sobs so deep their origin felt underwater.

He put his arms around her and squeezed. “
Poppie, leafe poppie
,” he said. His voice trembled. He put a hand against her hair and her sobs were like her feet on the dike, moving of their own free will. 

“You’re home,” Leen said.

He pulled her away to look at her. His face was gaunt and his eyes looked deeper set, enveloped by more folds of wrinkles, but they were still his warm eyes. “
Famke
, I am so glad to see you,” he said softly. 

“Where were you? Why were you gone so long?” 

“Shh,” he said.

“How did you get home? Are you hungry?” She was flooded with questions but there was one she did not ask.
Do you know, Pater? Do you know Issac is dead?

“They moved me quite a bit, but I was on the islands, Ameland, most of the time,” he said. “In a house with a false wall. A policeman’s house. He was supposed to be working for the Germans but he turned on them every chance he could. The last place I stayed was in Leeuwarden.” 

“You were gone so long, we thought you were dead. Oh Pater, too much has happened.” 

“Okay,
famke
,” he sighed. “Time for details later.” He let her lean against his chest. He seemed smaller to her. He wiped her face with his bare hand. His calluses barely registered on her skin. They had grown small. 

He pulled her away once more. His eyes were watery and deeply pink–rimmed. His skin was dry. It flaked along his cheeks and mouth, following the lines of his beard. He held her face. “You’ve changed so much. You’re grown.” 

“Pater, Issac–” She remembered Tine waiting for her in the street years ago and how she had said it, Wopke is dead, a simple sentence, but as complicated and as sharp as a dagger. Now, it was her turn, but she couldn’t do it. She’d never thought Tine was stronger, not until now.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

“Leen, who is there?” Tine’s voice called from the stairway.

Pater let her go. He took a few steps. “Tine,” he said, and it was her sister who supplied the shouts. 

Renske followed Tine quickly, and Leen stood back and watched their reunion, listening to each of them ask the same questions. She lit the stove. It was spring but he looked cold. She’d serve her father tea. She’d pour whiskey in it, give him a cigarette, put a blanket around his shoulders.

In between smiles and tears there was shuffling and a creak and another wail, coming from the top of the stairs. It was like a dog’s sad, soft whimper. Mem. 

She did not come down. Pater went to her, his homecoming to her private. Leen slumped on the bottom step of the stairs. She had never heard Pater cry like that, maybe not even for Wopke, when he had done his best to hide his grief from her. In those intervening years she had seen tears, but not heard the sound of his deep, throaty cries mixed with gasps for air, deep coughs and hacks and words that struggled to find a shape from black–scarred lungs and a broken heart, wails that came from the roof of the mouth, the well of the throat. It shook Leen to her very core, and as overcome and relieved as she was that Pater was home, she filled with a new kind of guilt, the kind that came after knowing he had done something big for the family, he had survived something horrific, but look: he had to come home to this.

The rest of the day and the next were a rush of preparations. A flock of women, directed by Mrs. Boonstra, descended on the house, scrubbing every corner, every wall, to ready them for visitors. Leen couldn’t imagine what it was like for Pater, inserted immediately into funeral preparations. How would congratulations be expressed at the same time?
We are happy to see you back, Oenze… and we are sorry for your loss. We are sorry you lost both your sons but we are glad that you are alive, that you outran the Krauts… Issac did his best. No one saw that coming…

Seeing her father was still a shock. It was like watching a newsreel of him; he had sound and movement, but she could not get close. His hand was always touching Mem. At first Leen thought it was tenderness, a husband who had just returned to his wife, but on the second night she could see there was effort behind it. He was pushing her along, pulling her through it. Mem barely spoke, and Leen avoided her. 

Every night, after the last of the visitors had left, she had nightmares. The worst took place at the funeral. Leen was seated next to Mem, but Mem kept falling asleep. Every minute Leen had to wake her but Mem could never keep her eyes open. They fluttered closed as fast as they fluttered open and her head drooped forward and Leen constantly had to shake her, knowing everyone was gaping at them, and she would get so angry, and she would shout at her, and then she would strike Mem over and over again and then Pater screamed at her to stop, this was her brother’s service, why couldn’t she keep her mother awake? 

She woke up, always, after this dream, looking into the half–dark spring night, only to fall asleep again to dream another. In this one she went out in the rain after the funeral and she would get soaked, right through her clothes to the skin, and then she would reach into her pocket for the pack of cigarettes Issac had given her and it would crumble in her hands. She’d try to take a cigarette out but one after the other would disintegrate until her hands were covered in shards of foil and tiny threads of brown tobacco. Frantically she’d try to draw them together into a pile but the rain was coming down so hard it washed them all away, leaving just a few strands clinging to her fingers.

On the morning of the funeral Tine roused Renske extra early to begin the baths. Leen laid in bed, telling herself just a few more minutes. She’d make the breakfast, get the coffee going. And then it would start.

Pater appeared in the doorway.

 “Morning,” Leen whispered. He looked exhausted. Something in him was so sorely depleted he was working from something else entirely.