The Shouting in the Dark (28 page)

Looking ahead, not back – it isn't a rule she needs to impose. Tomorrow stretches wide before her. There's so much to be done in it. There's so much more to be done with every new day now that she doesn't have to go about clenched like a fist, ready at every moment to take up arms, do battle with her adversary. Her hate-fuelled fight is now over: Daughter versus Monster,
Schepsel
versus Father, a fiercer bout every time. The fighter who was created by that fight has died in her, or at least has crept to a place where she no longer hears it stirring.

As for her one-time opponent, she doesn't think of him. The weekly letters from her mother she stuffs unread into the brown cardboard suitcase she came with to Toronto. The letters will only remind her of what she wants to forget. Now that her mother's safely back in the Netherlands, she likes to hark back to Africa, to reminisce about everything she didn't properly appreciate when she lived there, more's the pity,
wat een zonde
, the pine forest walks, the breathtaking views, the bracing air. Her monthly phone calls are full of this kind of talk. ‘Sitting on the verandah of our house, drinking in that view,' she says in Netherlands, ‘You felt you owned the world, didn't you think, Ella?' ‘No,' Ella says, ‘No. I didn't feel that. And besides you didn't ever spend much time on the verandah.'

If she is asked in passing, at the primary schools she visits, the evening classes she gives, how she got here to Toronto, so young, without her parents, she has on hand a few set-piece stories to explain. Her mother has always lived in Holland, she tells people. She, Ella, was drawn to Canada because she loved L.M. Montgomery's
Anne of Green Gables
and because Canadian forces liberated Holland in 1945 – this story is the true one. Her father was a rolling-stone type, she says, a bit of an entertainer, a raconteur, a wanderer, a blagger. He rolled his way around the sultry ports of the Indian Ocean; he died years and years ago. He had four wives, and a daughter almost by accident. This second story has some truth in it. Holland is where her heart belongs, she says, and Africa is a big and interesting place where she once spent time, collected and ate fried locusts, every morning drank fresh ostrich blood, lived in a thatched Zulu hut.

She repeats the stories so often, in bus queues, at recitation events, though not at school, not with her host family, that they become a manner of speaking, a habit. As she runs them through, as her mouth moves, she thinks about something else.

The world is all before her, but time, as the Greeks have told her, doesn't always run forwards in the smooth way you might expect. Unanticipated reminders can bring sudden loopbacks, interrupting the plain surface of things. Knotholes surface in the wood; one story fails to branch into another.

For the summer holidays Emma-Leigh proposes a cycling trip to Prince Edward Island, the home of L.M. Montgomery. They can take the train through Montreal to New Brunswick, then cycle the road through the pine forests from Amherst to the PEI ferry. ‘I never read those books,' Emma-Leigh smiles, ‘but I'm keen to have a look round our smallest province. They say the weather off the Atlantic makes the trees grow sideways, almost bent to the ground. They also say Lucy Maud herself was a weather vane, now up, now down, nothing like sunny Anne. In her diary she kept writing
I want freedom and a friend
. Looks like she didn't know which one was better.'

Ella wastes no time falling in with Emma-Leigh's plan. Though the summer is several months away, she signs herself out of school for the day and makes all the arrangements. She books the train tickets to Amherst at Toronto's Union Station and buys a second-hand bicycle, a boy's racer. She borrows all the
Anne
books from the school library, reads to the end of the first book and then stops, with Anne still carefree and irrepressible. The next week she also takes out
The Diary of Anne Frank
and skims through it in an evening. Funny, she notices, she hadn't spotted before: how much Anne Frank is like Anne Shirley. Anne Frank also lacked freedom and yearned for a friend.

On the first official day of spring, the snow still thick on the ground, a journalist from the local paper comes to interview Ella during her morning break at school. The following Saturday he meets her at the local ice rink, takes a picture of her skating clad in an orange ski-jacket, arms awkwardly akimbo, the unusual sight of a Dutchwoman unfamiliar with ice. The story and the photograph appear in the paper the following Monday but bar a few friendly glances from the staff at the newsagent where she buys it, it attracts little attention.
My aim is to get over to Prince Edward Island this summer
, the serif Times New Roman by-line announces. ‘Way to go, girl,' says the woman at the till. ‘At your age I still loved those
Anne
books, too.'

A month or so later the
Gazette
forwards her a letter. Someone has written in response to the article. She props the letter beside the phone in the hallway, reluctant to open it. The letter, she knows, will hark back whereas she is moving forwards. All letters hark back. That air letter signed in Chinese characters by the woman with the Panama hat. The
Gazette
's article already feels as if it was about another person, a newcomer she no longer resembles. She has gone skating many times since the day she was photographed. She made sure she did. Nowadays she can skate backwards, more or less; she can make the occasional figure-of-eight. The PEI trip with Emma-Leigh is just around the corner. Everything is ready. George has taught them how to mend punctured tyres and fix bike chains. In the evenings they go running, sometimes even skating, to get fit. Emma-Leigh tells Ella she'll make a final decision about drama school while they are on their journey.

For several days Ella leaves the
Gazette
's letter where it lies. As with the stuffed envelopes that come from the mother in Holland, she has grown used to leaving letters lying. Then Curt, the same journalist who wrote the article, calls to ask about the letter. When readers do write in, he says, we're always keen to gauge what they like to respond to. In this case, was it the photograph in the ice rink, the story— ?

She tears open the letter with Curt still on the line.
Wim Vermeer
, she reads the name signed in a large sloping hand across the bottom. It sounds distantly familiar, maybe because it's Dutch? She'd thought to read the letter out but, as it's only a few lines long and all in Nederlands, summarizes instead. The whole thing pivots on a question of names. In the context of the Dutch connections mentioned in the article, the letter writer Mr Wim Vermeer has recognized something about her name. Many years ago, he says, he served on a Royal Netherlands Navy N-class destroyer with the British Eastern Fleet alongside another officer bearing her family name. True, the ages don't quite compute, she seems quite young to be this man Har B's daughter, but the name – he'd recognize it anywhere. He'd wager it's related to his old friend.

If any of this rings true to her, the letter concludes, could they meet? He gathers from the article that her father is no longer alive. Still, he'd appreciate hearing news of him and, in return, he can perhaps give her, Har's daughter, a story or two about the old days. He includes a phone number, a west Toronto address.

For a while after Curt's call, Ella, still at the phone table, stares at the signature.
Wim Vermeer.
Then it jumps into focus. The
Van Galen
, Wim Vermeer. She hears the father's voice speaking the name out on the verandah, the clink of his tumbler on the glass-topped table. Wim Vermeer, the fellow officer trained in Trinco, transferred after time spent on the N-class sister ship the
Van Galen
back to the
Tjerk Hiddes
.

She arranges to meet Mr Wim Vermeer in a downtown café off Bloor Street not far from the Royal Ontario Museum. The café, suggested by Curt, is called the Red Gingham. Is the name unlucky or only vaguely inauspicious? There's no point worrying about it. She sets out early.

On her way down Bloor Street she passes the University of Toronto Student Union building, the big noticeboard wired to the gate. A bright yellow poster with green and red lettering catches her eye.
Waging the Armed Struggle inside the Police State
. Police state? – with those kinds of colours, that can be one place in the world only. She goes up to the poster, bends down to the small-print biography of the speaker at the bottom, and feels suddenly dizzy. Comrade M is an ex-guerrilla fighter, the poster says, a campaigner for justice in his home country, South Africa, now seeking asylum in Canada. He first left his home township aged sixteen, at the time of the student riots. He studied at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania, a school for black children on the run, named after the first protesting student to die. He's gone back across the border several times carrying armaments and supplies.

Ella looks at the blurry black-and-white photograph printed beside the biography. A young man in a woollen hat, his face half-averted. A round chin, a fleeting smile.

Solomon Mahlangu, she asks herself straightening up slowly, where has she seen that name before?
Solomon
? She pictures looping handwriting. The name on the muddy note Phineas sent, that's it, the name she thought was his other name. Solomon. Was he trying to send her a special message after all? She leans against the noticeboard to still her trembling. Did he intend the word as a secret sign? This is where I'm headed, is that what he was trying to tell her? This is my work. What I must tell you is more than just about your father.

But what does it matter? She checks the date. She can't attend this talk by the ex-guerilla Comrade M who isn't Phineas, doesn't have his smile. The talk's this time tomorrow. It'll be a bind to come into the city centre two days in a row, sign out of classes yet again. When, after all, she wants to be free of ghosts.

In the Red Gingham café Ella sits at a corner table with a cup of instant coffee, the cheapest coffee on the menu. Picture stencils of fruit salads make a wavering line around the walls. Curt has arranged to call by in an hour and a half to make sure the conversation is proceeding okay. If it turns out Mr Vermeer
did
know her father he might even take a picture, write up something. It's a great small-world story: how the war despite its cruel sunderings forged contacts across continents.

And Wim Vermeer
did
of course know her father Har B on the
Tjerk Hiddes
, it's confirmed the minute he shakes her hand and sits across from her, this tall, well-preserved man in his late sixties with his quiff of good white hair and light Canadian accent who however says the words
Tjerk Hiddes
with the same intonation that her father used to use. It's further confirmed when he at once begins sifting through details and pictures she thought she'd never encounter again but now flash up as clearly as on the day she first heard them, peering through the curtains. The green and blue harbour at Trinco shaped like a human hand. The nugget bricks of Fort Frederick. Old Schilperoort and his bitter rum-and-chocolate drinks called
kaai
. The Grote Oude Hoer, the courtyard bar full of scavenging crows. The happy ship; the happy happy ship. How happy was he, Wim, to be transferred from the
Van Galen
to the beautiful solidarity of the
Tjerk
.

Quickly she perceives that Wim Vermeer like her father is far more interested in his own stories than in others'. He talks and he talks some more. It's just as well, because, as she informs him as soon as he sits down, she has no stories of her father's to tell, he never told her his stories. Never? Wim's white eyebrows lift. No, never, though here and there, admittedly, she overheard stuff, picked up a few scraps. Then let me know what you'd like to hear. You'll know, surely, of our destroyer's finest hour? The time you sank the Japanese cruiser on the way to Suez? she suggests. Or the fight to the death in the North Atlantic? No, not those, I heard about those, but by then, as I can tell you, I'd already left the
Tjerk Hiddes
and the war at sea.

‘It happened like this.' Wim bends himself over his cup of filter coffee, rubs his hands as if to gather his thoughts. ‘What a time it was,' he finally says. ‘It changed us totally. After that, none of us would ever be the same again.

‘By early 1942, you see, the Japanese empire had thrown its arm across the whole Indonesian archipelago, where the one-time Netherlands Empire had seemingly hastened to make room for it. In the east of the island of Timor, at the very end of this great arm, at the fingers if you like, pockets of Australian and Netherlands Indies guerrillas, once of the Sparrow force, continued to the end of the year to put up a plucky resistance. But even they finally conceded that the game was up. The locals were turning them into the Japanese authorities wherever they found them. Evacuation had become urgent, by Christmas if possible.

‘It would be the trickiest and most dangerous of operations, as you might imagine. Only the most reliable of war vessels would be able to undertake it. Who to turn to but the
Tjerk Hiddes
? The ship of happy heroes that for some months already had been patrolling Australian waters, plying between Port Hedland and Fremantle, watching out for Japaners, the ship that moreover had experience evacuating troops from Flores under the guidance of the deft Klaas Sluijter? We were the victims of our own great reputation for courage under pressure, at least in the opinion of this yellow-livered officer. We were to be skewered by our own success. Our instructions, you see, were enough to chill the blood of the very bravest war hero.'

Ella looks out of the window. Hard to believe it's the city of Toronto out there, the sharply angled high-rises, the rush hour traffic streaming by – that, if she focused a little harder, it wouldn't be two rattan chairs she'd see, and smoke-rings rising.