For a Lost Soldier

Chapter 1

The alarm clock goes off at five o’clock in the morning. I stumble out of my little room. A rectangular shape is waiting relentlessly in the semi-darkness of the passage: the suitcase. This is the day then.

The linoleum is chill under my feet. Shivering, I wash in the basin. Even the small stream of tap-water seems noisy. My father walks about in stockinged feet, moving cautiously so as not to wake my little brother. He bends over the kitchen table, cuts a piece of bread in half and gives me a searching look.

‘Are you scared?’

‘No.’ I find it hard to talk, my throat is tight. I push the piece of bread away.

‘Too early for you?’

He helps me put a parting in my hair. I see myself in the mirror, a wan smudge.

Last week at school a nurse had rooted about in my hair with two small glass rods, looking for lice. I had felt her icy feelers make sudden movements with the total single-mindedness of a hunter in pursuit of prey. A little later, sweating, I saw her conferring with the teacher, her eyes fixed on me.

‘I’ve seen enough now, children,’ she said, ‘you’ll hear the results next week.’

What had she seen? My hairless head, shaved bald? ‘Nit king,’ they’d call after you then and wouldn’t let you come anywhere near them.

Luckily I’m leaving, not a moment too soon.

‘Get a move on whispers my father. ‘We’ve got to go.’ The suitcase is standing in the passage by the door, a looming and inescapable presence.

I vanish into my little room to put on my coat. Aimlessly I walk about in the small oblong-shaped space. What am I looking for? Everything has been packed. I yawn soundlessly, nervously. When I go back into the passage, the floorboards make a grating noise, and I know that every joint and crevice in the staircase will creak. I stand still, at a loss for a moment, then I go on down the dark stairs. My feet feel for the treads which I have run up and down confidently hundreds of times a day. My father, turning the key in the door, hisses a warning after me, ‘Hush, the neighbours are still asleep.’

On the second-floor landing I wait for my father, let him walk past me and then follow him down the dark tunnel, one hand anxiously clasping the banister.

The front door stands half open, a beam of early sunshine filled with swirling specks of dust slanting in.

My father hands me the suitcase.

‘You may as well put it down on the pavement.’

I take a few uncertain steps into the deserted street. My long shadow falls brightly outlined across the paving stones. The cool morning air tickles my nose and blows across my bare knees. I sneeze. The sound rebounds against the houses. I lookup at the windows. Some are criss-crossed with strips of brown sticky-tape or covered with rolls of blackout paper. The makeshift pipes of emergency stoves jut out here and there through broken window-panes.

The balcony doors stand open like gaping mouths, breathing stillness and sleep. This is the day then, when I am leaving all this behind. By the time the children in the street wake up I won’t be there any more.

Annie and Willie, Jan, little Karel, Appie: I have gone away. Gone. To the farmers.

I still knew nothing about it up to the day before yesterday. Then one of my father’s colleagues – ‘Frits’, my father called him – had come round. They had gone into the front room to talk with the door closed.

‘Go to your room for a bit. We shan’t be long.’

When Mr Anderson had left, my father came and sat on my bed and put his arm round me. That was odd.

The next morning I watched my father feeding my little I Mother, spoonful by spoonful. Without looking up, he had scraped the empty plate as if trying to scratch the bottom off , and then suddenly he had said, slowly and deliberately, ‘You know, Jeroen, you could go to stay with some farmers for a little while. There’s a lorry leaving on Monday, you can go with it. Lots of food, and playing in the fresh air.’

He had looked at me without conviction, as if he were talking to a stranger.

‘I think you should, you know. It’ll do you good to get away from here for a while. And there’ll be that much more to eat for Bobbie.’

I had said nothing, indifferently drawing little figures on the table with my finger.

‘It won’t be for long, the war will soon be over. They’re already in France. And then you’ll be back home.’

I look up at our balcony where the curtain is billowing in the wind. Behind it my little brother is asleep in the small side-room. If he should wake up suddenly and start to cry there’ll be no one to lift him out of his cradle. He’ll bawl the place down.

Leaving home, something I had at first sensed dully and vaguely, now hits me with full force. Tension seizes me between the eyebrows, terror reverberates in the aching hollow of my belly. My body contracts, I feel as if I’m going to be sick.

My father comes out with the bicycle, pulls the door shut softly behind him and parks the bicycle at the kerb as quietly as he can. His face is drawn and tired.

I climb on to the luggage carrier and my father places the suitcase between us. I move back a little; the bars of the carrier press coldly against my behind, the edge of the suitcase cuts into my thighs.

We take off with an awkward wobble, the iron rims rattling across the cobblestones. With each bump I shrink more into myself, clinging tightly to my father’s coat.

Before we clatter around the corner I take a last look at our window, our balcony. The sunlight is reflected by the glass and the white net curtain waves like a pale hand. Bye.

We take Admiraal de and then the . I have never seen the streets so empty, so deserted. The rusty tram-lines stretch out far down the road. We get off the bicycle at a broken piece of road full of sandy potholes and walk along the pavement. I have trouble balancing the suitcase on the carrier. Why are we in such a hurry?

We walk past an empty house. Through the smashed window-panes I can see a man and a woman down on their knees. They are prising planks out of the floor. As we walk by, they stop panic-stricken. The woman presses herself against the floor trying to hide from us. Ashamed of our indiscreet staring, I turn my head away.

‘The lorry is on the Dam, near the Royal Palace,’ my father says. ‘At least it had better be there by now, or else you’ll just have to wait by yourself. I’ll have to get back straight away, on account of the Jerries. And Bobbie’ll be waking up soon.’

People have formed a silent queue outside a dilapidated shop with a dingy display window. It seems to have been disused for some time. We rattle past. I catch the eye of a man leaning against the wall. He has a distant, grey look.

I want to go back, I don’t want to leave. The lorry surely won’t be there yet, it’s too early.

But then, on the shady side of the Palace, I see it: a pick-up truck with a canvas cover over the loading platform. A man is sitting slumped in the cab, looking straight in front of him through the filthy windscreen.

‘Is this the lorry for Friesland, for the Fokker children?’

The man has sleepy eyes. He mumbles something to my father that I can’t catch. Perhaps we are wrong, perhaps the whole thing is a mistake.

We go to the back of the lorry and my father hoists my suitcase over the tail-board.

‘What do you want to do, wait outside or shall I help you in?’

I look at how high the back of the lorry is. I won’t be able to get up there by myself.

‘Please lift me in.’

The iron floor is cold against my knees. There is a pile of grey blankets in a corner, but I daren’t take one.

‘Daddy.’

My father has gone back to the front of the lorry and is looking to the driver again.

‘Daddy, I don’t feel very well. I’d better go back with you, I’m beginning to feel really sick.’

If it had been my mother I would have burst into loud, heart-rending sobs and clung tightly to her. She would have taken me back home with her.

‘Chin up, my boy.’ My father hands me a registration card with a few sheets of ration coupons attached to it. ‘Look after these because they’re going to want them in Friesland. Don’t lose them, whatever you do.’

He hoists himself up on to the tail-board and I throw my ,arms around his neck. ‘Take care, won’t you. And write.’

I can’t get an answer out. My body is trembling with pent-up terror. Through a haze I watch the blue of his coat receding from the lorry. A wave of his arm, lit brightly by the Bun, and then he is round the corner. Gone.

The man in the cab taps against the window.

‘It won’t be long now,’ he calls out, ‘just as soon as everybody turns up.’

The lorry door slams shut. A couple of sparrows are chirping in the sun on the other side of the street. I crawl to the furthest corner of the platform and position the suitcase next to me. I draw my knees up and feel a drop falling onto my leg and trickling down along my thigh.

I am woken up by someone nudging my shoulder. A girl is sitting next to me and is trying, with a great deal of tugging and pulling, to shove a bag behind her back. She is leaning against me, making a sound halfway between laughing and crying. There is a bow in her hair that has come loose and she has a red nose which she keeps clearing with snuffling noises. I sit up straight. At least seven children must have joined us. They are quiet and pale, no one talks. Some are nicely dressed, others look shabby. I see that one of the boys has a shaved head. Nit king. The clothes of the girl next to me give off a mean, stale smell that catches in my throat. Outside, in the sun, a woman with a green headscarf stands by the side of the lorry talking animatedly to the driver.

The town has come to life. People are walking past the lorry, some peering inside inquiringly, as if searching for something. A German lorry is standing a bit further up the street, an armed soldier by its side.

‘Listen, children,’ the woman with the headscarf is leaning over inside, ‘the Germans won’t let us leave until evening. And there are still a few more children to come. Anyone wanting to spend a penny had best come with me now.’

The girl next to me clambers out. I need to pee, too, but stay in my corner. I lay my head on the suitcase and fall into a vacant doze. This lorry doesn’t exist, these children don’t exist, I myself don’t exist. I go on registering all the sounds in the lorry; they seem far away, as if coming from another life.

Time seems to dissolve into waiting. I don’t know how long we have been there, three hours, ten hours, a day even.

Still more children have joined us and now the lorry seems crammed with bodies, suitcases, bags, all thrown chaotically together. The lady is sitting in the middle, her knees drawn up. She has draped the green scarf over her legs, looking watchfully around as if checking up on us one by one.

The light outside has changed; there are hardly any people in the streets any more. I can still see the German lorry, but the soldier has gone.

I raise my hand.

‘I need to go to the toilet.’

Silently the lady beckons. I crawl to the back of the lorry and climb over the tail-board. She holds me by the elbows and lets me down. ‘Do it beside the truck.’ She points. There is a narrow strip of pavement between the lorry and the Palace. My legs feel wobbly. When I try to open my trousers I am too weak to undo the buttons and nearly wet my pants.

I shiver as the jet spatters against the wall. A sound escapes from my throat and my teeth chatter. It is evening, the sky is turning grey. Shuddering, I look over my shoulder and wonder in which direction I would have to go to get home.

This is all a fragile, glassy dream; it feels as if everything is blurred and happened a long time ago. I turn round. The driver is hanging out of the window, watching me pee. I move backwards. There is a dark stain against the wall and on the pavement, a sign I have left behind, a distress signal for anyone who may be looking for me.

I am hoisted back up again and creep into my corner. Each child is an island to himself, one you may not touch.

Opposite me I see a face I recognise. It is the boy who has been sitting with his head half-hidden under a coat. He smiles and I smile back uncertainly.

‘Jan,’ I say.

How can that be, how has Jan ended up in this lorry? Jan Hogervorst, from our street, from the house across the road.

Jan sits up straight. ‘Come over here,’ he whispers and shoves something to one side, ‘there’s room.’

But I know better than to leave my suitcase unattended. Jan crawls across to me, pushing in between me and the girl. Immediately I feel that I can sit more easily. Our legs lean against each other and Jan pushes one hand into the back of my knee.

‘Cold legs.’

He turns to the girl. ‘What’s your name?’ he says bossily.

‘He’s called Jeroen and I’m Jan. Are you going to Friesland too?’

She leans away from him with an unfriendly expression. ‘I live near here,’ she says. ‘In Bloedstraat. My name is Greetje.’

She starts to cry, softly at first, then in long drawn-out wails. The lady turns round, looking furious.

‘Be a bit quieter, all of you.’

‘She stinks like a horse as well,’ says Jan. ‘Shove up a bit, I can’t stand it.’

Grudgingly I draw further back into the corner. I can feel Jan sagging closer towards me, breathing heavily.

Then I too fall asleep again.

I can see the tops of trees flitting by through a gap in the canvas overhead. Flashes of sky and the violent rustle of branches and leaves.

‘We’ve nearly reached Hoorn,’ whispers the teacher, ‘but we’ve been told to wait by the IJsselmeer Dam, until it’s completely dark.’ She looks at her watch. ‘Half past eight.’

I think of my mother, wonder where she is. Perhaps we drove past her and I didn’t know.

She left three days ago, with her sister. Both of them were on rickety old bikes. ‘We’re going to the polder,’ she had said, ‘to get some potatoes from the farmers. Maybe other things too, if we’re lucky. Flour and milk.’

I had watched them go from our balcony, cycling together to the end of the street, empty panniers on their luggage carriers. When she looked up and waved I hadn’t waved back, making sure she knew that I was cross.

By the time she gets back I’ll be gone; only Daddy and Bobbie will be there. She should never have gone away and now it’s too late. Is this the polder that we’re driving through? If I were to go and sit near the tail-board, I should have a better view of the road. You never know, I might suddenly see her.

Will she be upset to find that I’m gone, will she write to me? But perhaps the post doesn’t go to Friesland.

The lorry comes to an abrupt halt. I fall against Jan; a suitcase topples over. ‘The Germans,’ I hear someone say.

There are voices and soon afterwards the tail-board is let down. Outside stands a soldier, yellow light reflecting off his helmet. He is carrying a rifle. A man with a cap looks inside, our driver behind him with his hands in his pockets. The lady crawls through to the end of the lorry and passes .nine papers to the German. It all looks very conspiratorial and reminds me of the war games we used to play in the evenings in the bushes along the canal.

‘Sit up straight, all of you, and keep your luggage next to you.’

The soldier with the rifle climbs in and moves bent over double between us. He shoves the cases about and orders two boys to get up. Then they are told to sit down again and he gives them both a pat on the cheek. No one makes a sound.

The man with the cap jumps out of the lorry and waves.

‘Gute Rise.’

‘He says have a good journey,’ explains the lady, ‘so wave to him.’

Beside us Greetje gives a stifled giggle.

A soldier who looms up out of the dark shines a torch into the back of the lorry, a piercing searchlight. Then suddenly it Is dark again. We all crawl out from our places and everyone starts to talk at once. ‘What did he do that for? What did he want you to do? Did he hit you?’ We are all curious about the two boys, they are our heroes.

‘Let’s push all the luggage together now, then there’ll be room for everyone. If we spread the blankets out we’ll all be able to get some sleep.’

We lie down close together, like spoons in a drawer. Jan and I have our faces turned towards each other, I can feel his breath on my face. Suddenly, everything is mysterious and exciting. We look at each other and I feel a prod under the blanket.

Jan chuckles. He turns over. Silence.

I can see some people approaching out of the dark. They look around cautiously and move without making a noise,

‘Who’s in charge here?’ a voice whispers. ‘We’ve got to get to Amsterdam. A boy has been taken ill, he’s lying up the road on the verge. Can you take him with you?’

Not a sound. Is the lady asleep or is she pretending? I try to make out how many people there are and prop myself up a little. Perhaps my mother is there with them.

‘Please, there’s no time to be lost. Isn’t there anyone in charge here?’

‘We’re going the other way. This is a children’s transport to Friesland.’

The lady’s voice sounds muffled, as if she were holding a cloth to her mouth.

‘You’d best get away from here, it’s too dangerous.’

Someone starts to moan softly. Everyone in the lorry is wide awake. My heart thumps. There are footsteps and German voices.

The strangers duck out of sight. We can hear them running for it.

The lorry is moving again, jolting along slowly.

‘Now we’re going up the Dam,’ whispers the lady. ‘Let’s hope the planes don’t see us, or we’ve had it.’

Jan nestles close up to me, one arm around me, his knees tucked into the backs of mine. Unexpectedly a hand grips me firmly between the legs.

‘Nice nookie,’ he whispers in my ear.

I jerk my head up. The lady has lain down as well, I can see lots of little grey hummocks all around me. In the other corner there is a sound as if someone is choking back sobs. The grip in my crotch loosens.

‘Any idea how much longer all this is going to take? We must be sure to stay together, you know. Hey, are you listening? We mustn’t let them split us up.’

I wish Jan would shut up.

‘Go to sleep, everyone,’ hisses a voice.

I take hold of Jan’s hand and pull it up to my chest. Now and then the lorry drives over a pothole and my head bumps against the hard floor. Jan’s arm has a safe feel to it. I listen to I lie noise of the tyres on the road.

We wake up with a start. The tail-board has banged open and a few of the suitcases have fallen out with a crash; I can hear them sliding around the road.

There is crying. A few children stand up confused and are pulled back down again. We thump our fists against the cab, but the driver keeps going. Outside it is pitch-black.

The lady leans out and swings the tail-board back up.

It could have been my suitcase, I think. No more underwear, no towel, no socks. Have I still got my registration card?

I feel in my trouser pocket. Jan’s arm slips off me. I must remember to keep my hand on my registration card, otherwise I’ll lose that as well.

The driver drives over the Dam with dipped headlights. That I ceaseless murmuring is the sea. A gull drifts over the road like a scrap of paper and disappears into the dark. The lorry is a mole burrowing through the night.

All the other children sleep, like animals seized with fear. I heir bodies shake in unison at every bump in the road. Only the lady is awake. She stares at the flapping canvas with mile-open eyes.

Chapter 2

Dishevelled, our faces grubby and apprehensive, we huddle together in the morning mist. Two hulking men have lifted us out of the lorry and now we are waiting, expecting the worst.

Jan is sitting on his suitcase, staring at the ground, yawning without stopping. No one says a word.

The lady and the driver have walked away from one end of the lorry. What are they talking about?

We are at a crossroads. I can see quiet country lanes disappearing in three directions. The village stretches out on two sides: small houses, little gardens, a church. Not a soul is to be seen, everyone is asleep.

The road in front of us disappears into dank pastures where the motionless backs of cows stick up out of the mist like black and white stones in a grey river. Is this Friesland? Surely it can’t be.

‘Friesland is one of the northernmost provinces in the Netherlands’, I was taught at school, which would make me think of frozen white mountains and snow-fields. The North Pole, Iceland, Friesland: they all conjured up a cold and mysterious image of icebergs and northern lights, of unknown worlds benumbed with cold.

But where we are now is just like those outskirts of Amsterdam that I would see when I had a day out bicycling with my mother and father during the holidays: green trees, a village street, small houses with low-pitched roofs, absolutely nothing to boast about later in our street back home.

But perhaps this is only a stop on the journey, a short break on the road to our mysterious destination. Several men come out of a gloomy little building with a pointed gable, something halfway between a church and a storehouse. Country people because they are wearing clogs.

They talk in low voices and walk unhurriedly, ponderously, towards the lady. One of them holds the doors of the little building open and beckons us: we are to go inside.

It smells damp in the building, musty, as if no one has been in it for a long time.

Warily we shuffle across the wooden floor and sit down quietly on the narrow benches lined up against the walls. The room is high and bare. There is a bookcase with rows of Hue-jacketed books and folded clothes, and hanging on two 11| the walls are rectangular slate boards, one of them chalked with mysterious letters and figures:

I wonder if they have something to do with us. Perhaps they are check-marks to be entered on our registration cards so that we can always be identified and traced.

High up on the walls small windows in cast-iron frames let in a little dim light. I look at the row of bent backs on either side of me. There is some shuffling of feet and a bout of hoarse coughing. Jan is sitting some distance from me. He doesn’t move but his eyes are following the lady, who is being excessively busy with the luggage. She shifts and rearranges the suitcases as she notes down on a sheet of paper how many have already been brought in and which ones belong to whom. From time to time she looks at us thoughtfully and bites her pencil.

She is sharing us out, I think to myself. I must go up and tell her that Jan and I belong together, that we’ve got to stay together.

‘You’ll be given something to eat in a minute.’ She points to a table where a pile of bread and butter is lying half-hidden under a teacloth, beside a tin kettle.

‘As soon as you’ve eaten, you’ll be taken to your families. There is one for each of you here in the neighbourhood.’ What does she mean? All of us look stunned or half asleep.

She pushes two bags to one side and crosses something out on the list. ‘You are very lucky that these kind people are willing to take you in, so be on your best behaviour. They speak Frisian here, it’s hard to understand.’

She makes an attempt at a roguish laugh and pulls a childish face. ‘At first you’ll find you can’t make head or tail of it, I can’t understand half of it myself. But in a month’s time you’ll be speaking it really fluently, just you wait and see.’

We stare at her blankly, as if her words aren’t getting through to us. Why is she laughing, why are we having to sit here all this time?

I can see my suitcase, somewhere at the back, so it’s still there. But really I couldn’t care less, what does a suitcase matter?

Jan has already been given his food and is holding a mug of milk between his knees. He hasn’t spoken one word and looks straight through me, as if we had never known each other or even lived in the same street together. But I couldn’t care less about that any more.

A few men are standing round a table by the door. As they talk, they look at us and point or nod in our direction. Then one of them buries his nose in a writing-pad, as if he is doing a complicated multiplication sum.

One man points his finger at the paper while looking at us out of the corner of his eyes. Then he lifts the fingers of his other hand up, counting: one, two, three… When it won’t work out, he starts all over again: one, two…

We eat our bread and butter in silence, peering over our mugs as we drink our milk.

The driver sits a bit further back on a chair. He has a small pile of bread in front of him and chews steadily, looking peevish and disgruntled.

I have a plan. I’ll go straight up to him and ask him if the lorry is going back again, and if I may go along too. No one will notice if I disappear. I’ll save my bread and butter and if I give it to him he’ll be sure to let me. I look around: what am I doing here in this stuffy; dark room? Why did I ever allow myself to be taken to the lorry? I should have run away while we were still in Amsterdam. I am filled with regrets.

I picture the driver suddenly, giving me a friendly smile as he takes me along with him to the lorry. Unnoticed, we’ll start it up and drive away. Escape!

But I know that I shall go on dutifully sitting here waiting to lee what they will do with me. The driver stands up, talks to I the men by the table and unexpectedly walks out. Too late. I’ll have to think up another plan…

The lady takes the first two children by the hand and leads them out like animals to the slaughter. Everyone left behind stares after them.

They have no luggage with them: so it must have been their suitcases which fell out of the lorry last night. Outside the door we can suddenly hear loud crying and the furiously scolding voice of the lady. I can feel all the children in the hall growing smaller, terrified at the sound.

The silence that follows has something threatening about it and there is a strange tension between the adults and the children. The men stand close together. They seem to be uniting against us. Are they likely to hurt us, can we trust them? They talk in hushed voices and not one of them has a smile. They look at each other worriedly and then at us, as if we are an insoluble problem.

Greetje from Bloedstraat is part of the next group to go. She smiles at me with the corners of her mouth turned down, lop-sided like the limp bow in her tangled hair. She makes an almost imperceptible movement with her hand: bye.

Next it’s Jan’s turn. When the lady calls out ‘Hogervorst’, he picks his case up firmly and walks to the door. I follow him with my eyes. ‘If we just stay together,’ Jan had said. Now he is leaving the hall without even sparing me a glance.

Slowly but steadily all the children disappear. I am the only one left behind, just like what always happens during games at school when the boys pick who is going to play in which eleven.

It doesn’t surprise me, I never get picked, it’s all part of the same misery. The men look at me from behind the table; the papers come out again; there is a brief discussion. The lady shrugs her shoulders and looks at her watch. ‘According to the list you should have been a girl,’ she says impatiently, walking over to me. ‘They’ve made a blunder somewhere as usual. Nothing we can do about it now…’

I pretend to understand, smiling vaguely.

When I am suddenly told to stand up I feel a blinding fear. Stiff-legged I go over to my suitcase and walk out of the door. All their eyes are on me and I have the feeling that everyone is breathing a sigh of relief.

Before I know what exactly is happening, I am sitting on the back of a man’s bicycle, too scared to hold on to his coat.

In my terror I have failed to take a last look at the lady and the driver, the last people known to me. All at once I feel I can’t do without them, now that I am being left alone with this silent man who is pedalling away with his back bent against the wind. We leave a village street behind and then bicycle along a road that curves through sloping pasture-land and past quiet farmhouses. Here and there cows or sheep huddle sullenly together, their shapes reflected in still ditches.

I am sure that even the cows know that I am a stranger here, because sometimes one of them lifts her head and stares after me with round, moist eyes.

Without warning, the man suddenly stops in the middle of the meadows and gets off.

‘It’s a fair stretch,’ he says. I can hear he is doing his best to speak distinctly so that I can understand. ‘We’re making for Laaxum, by the sea. You’ll be lodging with fisherfolk, good people. But I’ve got to go back first, we’ve left your suitcase at the Sunday school.’ I stand all alone on the road, feeling as if I’ve been dropped from the moon. Fields of grass all around me and not a soul in sight.

This is a trap, of course, the man will never come back. I’ve been left here to starve to death, they meant me to all along. And my father was in it as well, that’s for sure. They want to get rid of me.

The man had said, ‘You’ll be lodging with fisherfolk.’ That was wrong for a start. My father had told me over and over again that we would be boarding with farmers, farmers with sheep and stables, haystacks, goats and horses. Like in the hooks I’d read at school. Fisherfolk? I have a nightmare vision of a ramshackle wooden hut on a wide, wind-blown shore with two old people sitting silently, continually mending nets. I can’t stand fish. I can’t get it down my throat, I’d sooner starve or choke to death! What am I doing here, why am I having to put up with all this? Where is my mother, where is our safe little home? And where have they taken Jan? If I knew where he was we might at least try to escape together. Shall I run back and try to find the driver? If I hurry, the lorry may still be in the village.

A spark of hope. I start racing back down the road like one possessed. The silence roars in my ears with every step I take. I have the taste of blood in my throat.

A cow lifts her head and lows loudly and plaintively. In the distance the man is coming back on the bicycle, my suitcase dangling from the handlebars. When, panting, I stop running, he looks at me in surprise, but asks no questions. I’ve been caught out and feel a little ridiculous. Shamefaced, I get back onto the luggage carrier.

We bicycle on, a road without end.

‘See that dyke at the end of the road? That’s where we’re going.’

I poke my head out from behind the man, but quickly pull back when I get the wind full in my face. I’ll be seeing it soon enough.

‘Off you get. This is Laaxum. We’re there.’

I take a look around and see empty, wind-swept countryside with little houses dotted about. Is this a village, this handful of tiny, scattered dwellings? The loneliness grips me and clamps my chest.

We climb over a wooden fence and wade through tall grass. A grazing horse takes a few snorting steps away from us and I quickly draw closer to the man. Another fence, and then to the little house on the left. No trees, no bushes, nothing. Emptiness.

At the back of the house is a stable-door, the upper half open.

‘Akke!’ calls the man. He steps out of his clogs and we go inside.

A large, heavily built woman in dark clothes, seemingly consisting of nothing but enormous round shapes, is bending over in a low room. When she draws herself up, the room looks too small for her. She has a strong face and immensely wide eyes. She walks to the table, drops into a chair and pins back a loose strand into her knot of hair. One of the Fates, as large as life, looking first at my escort and then at me and then bursting into loud and incredulous laughter.

‘Oh, heavens, it’s our war child.’ She looks me over from head to toe. ‘But we asked for a girl for our Pieke to play with.’ Her voice takes on an annoyed and threatening tone.

She stands up, filling the room with her bulk again, moving towards me: there is no escaping her.

‘Go and sit down there.’

I huddle into a chair by the window she points out to me.

Pasture-land outside, emptiness and wind. Inside it smells of food and burning wood. The man goes and sits down to talk at the table with the woman, conspirators speaking an incomprehensible language.

‘He goes to church, I take it?’ Suddenly the question is clearly comprehensible.

I say ‘yes’ quickly. A lie, but otherwise they might throw me out straight away. I’ll hand over the registration card with the ration coupons now. Maybe that’ll make her think a bit better of me. I feel in my pockets: empty. Frantically I look through all my clothes: it can’t be, I can’t have lost them?

The man gets up and holds out his hand to me. ‘They’ll look after you well here,’ he says, ‘as long as you eat up.’

Another familiar face going out of my life. I feel like excess ballast, shunted from one person to another.

The door rattles; I hear the man step into his clogs.

As he recedes into the distance the woman continues her conversation with him, shouting loudly over the fields as he disappears. Then the voices stop and all I can hear is clattering in the kitchen. Maybe the woman is never going to come back into the room again. Silence. A clock ticks behind me.

When she does come back in, my face is wet. She wipes my cheeks dry roughly with her apron, but her silence is friendly and considerate.

‘Ah, little one,’ she says putting my suitcase on the table, ‘are you tired? Would you like something to drink?’

I shake my head. She doesn’t seem cross any more that I’m not a girl, the ice has been broken.

She opens my suitcase. ‘Not very much,’ she says looking the contents over. But then she lifts up a towel and is full of admiration. ‘What a beauty.’ She holds it spread out in front of her. ‘All those colours. That must have cost a lot of money.’

I look at it: a little piece of home.

She sits down facing me by the other window and picks up a bowl of potatoes from the floor. ‘The others will be home soon, then we’ll eat.’ Her eyes bore into me.

The sound of the knife cutting through the potatoes and the ticking of the clock. The window-panes creak in the wind. I peer behind me: it’s only half past nine. Nervously, I take in the smells, the sounds and the shapes. Even time is different here, slow and dragging. Eternities seem to have gone by since yesterday.

My eyes fall shut and I wake in confusion as the woman drops a potato in the pan. I must stay awake, who knows what’ll happen to me otherwise…

A small wooden plate hangs on the wall facing me. ‘Where Love Abides the Lord is in Command.’ Love, I know that, and command as well. You give commands to dogs. Come. Sit. Down. The Lord must be God, of course, but…

‘How old are you?’ Again that inquiring look.

‘Eleven. I’ve just started the sixth year.’

‘Eleven. The same as our Meint. That’s good, the two of you can do your homework together.’

She walks out of the room and I follow her obediently. Outside she pumps water into a pan and throws the potatoes in. Then she puts the pan on the kitchen-range in a shed fitted up as a cookhouse. She throws logs on to the fire and pokes it hard. Sparks fly out into the open.

‘Does your mother cook on a stove as well?’

I nod ‘yes’, afraid she’ll send me away otherwise. I’ve made up my mind to agree with everything she says.

In my mind’s eye I can see my mother in a summery, bright kitchen, the veranda door open and me playing outside.

The woman’s large round back moves about steadily while she sweeps the stone floor. She pushes me outside firmly because I am in her way. Shivering with cold, I lean against the little shed and look at the dyke that runs from end to end of the horizon. I can hear the sea: somewhere beyond it lies Amsterdam.

When the woman goes back into the house I hang back, then walk meekly after her. I duck into the chair by the window and wait. The clock ticks insistently. Slowly I doze off and give a start when I hear the sound of voices outside the door. Suddenly they hush. A girl’s voice asks, ‘Is he in the room?’ I brace myself in the chair as the doorknob moves.

Chapter 3

We eat potatoes and meat. No greens. Two big pans stand on the table and the father does the serving up. Now and then somebody holds out a plate without saying a word, the big boy has had three helpings already.

I look around the circle. There are six children sitting at table, shoulder to shoulder, all of them fair, all of them sturdy and all of them silent. They eat hunched over forwards, as if it is hard, strenuous work. They have lost interest in me.

I feel hemmed in and small and try not to take up any room when making movements towards my plate. At strategic moments I take a bite quickly and as unobtrusively as possible, swallowing hurriedly. After a few bites my body feels tired and leaden, a wave of liquid rising up inside me and burning in my throat.

I clench my fingers around the edge of the chair and think of home.

More and more people had come clumping into the small room, first a boy and a girl my age, followed by a smaller girl with a limp. She had hobbled through the room, steadying herself against the table or the wall. Later a couple more came in who were older, Popke, a tall, weather-beaten boy – the only one to hold out his hand to me and to introduce himself – and a boisterous girl with sturdy breasts under her tight dress.

She had been talking noisily as she came into the room, but when she had seen me sitting there, she had suddenly fallen silent as if someone were sick, or dead.

They had all of them looked me over, a strange little boy in their house sitting there uncomfortably in a chair. After the first awkward silence, they started talking among themselves in undertones. Sometimes I could hear them stifle a laugh. When I glanced in their direction, one of the girls burst out laughing and ran quickly out of the room.

A hush did not fall until the father said commandingly, ‘That will do for now.’ He had come in on black wool-stockinged feet, wearing an old, too-short pair of trousers on his skinny body. He surveyed me with a small lop-sided smile in the corners of his mouth.

‘So you’ve come from the city to see for yourself how we get on here, eh? Well, we can show them a thing or two in Amsterdam, eh, boys?’ He looked around the room. ‘We’ll soon make a man out of him.’

He put a hand on my shoulder and then sat down facing me. Preparing for a new cross-examination, I thrust myself back in my chair as far as I could. The man bent over forward and rubbed his feet, one after the other, an agonised expression on his face. The lame girl went to her father’s side with an exaggerated show of affection. She placed her hand on his knee and leant her head against the back of his chair, looking at me curiously as she did so. I could see she was putting this on for my benefit.

‘That’s your new comrade, Pieke, her father had said. ‘Go and show him round the house, so that he’ll know his way about.’

But the two of us kept our distance and didn’t move. I tried to avoid meeting the girl’s eyes and looked uncertainly at the father. I could sense he was a gentle man and that he was taking me for what I was, without any fuss. His gestures were made with deliberation, it looked at times as if he were caressing the air. He sat very quietly, and his look in my direction was friendly and reassuring.

While he’s there, I thought, things will be a bit easier.

The girls came in with the plates and the cutlery and pushed everything about on the table, making a great deal of noise. The father put his hand on my shoulder and showed to my place. ‘Between Popke and Meint. All the menfolk together.’ He looked round to see if everyone had sat down and said briefly, almost inaudibly, ‘Right.’

The scraping of chairs stopped. Stillness settled over the .mall room like a heavy blanket. The family sat with folded I lands, heads bowed. I looked at the big woman who gave the impression of watching me even with her eyes closed. She made a strange movement with her mouth, as if her teeth had slipped forward a little. I quickly shut my eyes and took up I he same posture as the others, peeping out of the corners of m v eyes to see when the prayer was over. Suddenly there was a chorus of mumbled voices, ‘Bless, oh Lord, this food and drink. Amen.’

‘Don’t your people say grace before meals?’ the woman asked. I searched for an explanation that would ring true but I her father answered for me.

‘People in the city are used to something else, eh boy? Aren’t they?’

He gave a brief laugh as though he had seen through me.

Potatoes with meat. I can’t remember how long it has been nice we last ate meat in Amsterdam. And here you can have i; much as you like, all you need to do is hold up your plate.

The meal goes by silently and quickly. Things I was never allowed to do at home seem quite all right here: they put their elbows on the table and bend their heads low over their plates. They watch me eat. I have difficulty getting the food down and have to swallow hard. I try to put down my fork without being noticed, but I can feel the woman’s eyes upon me. The smell of the food gives me a queasy feeling in my stomach. Now and then someone says a few words, then they go on eating in silence. I listen to the sound of the forks and the swallowing and chewing.

My stomach gives a spasm and before I can hold it back I belch violently. I feel myself turning red with embarrassment, but no one seems to pay any attention to my lapse. Only the woman halts her fork halfway up to her mouth and stares at me.

When everyone has finished eating, the father says ‘Diet,’ in the same brief tone. The girl in the tight dress gets up and takes a book from the small sideboard.

‘Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob.’

The book lies open on her lap and she reads in a monotonous drone. I try to understand what she is saying. Every so often she reads a few words twice over, the second time altering the pitch of her voice and allowing the sound to die away. That means it’s the end of a sentence.

Her voice is high-pitched.

Her voice falls and tails off.

During the recital, everyone seems to be dropping off into an after-dinner nap. The girl claps the Bible shut and puts it back on the sideboard matter-of-factly. The mother looks pleased and satisfied, even with me. When they all fold their hands again, I know that the meal is over. Suddenly I am hungry. Will we be getting a cooked meal tonight as well?

A shiny strip of sticky paper in twisted coils hangs over the table, strewn with little black lumps of flies. One of them is still buzzing, so violently that I can feel the vibrations all along my spine. Dear God, please let me go back home soon. Help them in Amsterdam and protect them. I shall do whatever You say. Do I have to pray for the fly as well?

The chairs are pushed back from the table and everybody gets up. What next? Something new, or back to my chair? Meint and the disabled girl leave the room. I feel a push from the father’s hand. ‘Go have a look outside, why don’t you.’

When I step out of the door the wind hits me with great force, taking my breath away and nearly blowing me over. I lean into the billowing wind, gasping for breath, and am

driven two steps back.

The two children disappear around the corner and sit down on a small bench by the side of the house where the wind is less fierce. I trail after them awkwardly and try to think of something to say or to ask.

‘Behind that dyke,’ says the boy, ‘is the harbour. That’s where our ship is.’

He points. The girl makes room on the bench. Carefully I push in next to her. The long grass on the dyke is forming fanciful shapes in the wind, rippling like swirling water.

‘I’m Meint,’ says the boy and holds out his hand. ‘We are brothers now.’

Where the road runs up along the dyke, I can see several masts between the roof of a farmhouse and the top of a tree, bobbing to and fro in an ungainly dance. ‘Are you allowed to go sailing in the boat sometimes?’ I ask the question carefully, but the girl explodes into derisive laughter as if I had said something stupid.

Meint gives her a prod so that she tips over onto the grass. ‘She had polio, and now she’s got a bad leg. She isn’t used to city talk,’ he adds apologetically. The girl hobbles restlessly to and fro in front of us as if trying to wear herself out. A little bird in a cage.

Our house is the last in the small village. It stands apart from the other houses that lie at the foot of the dyke. Quite a long way past the village I can see how the dyke slopes gently upwards in a tapering hill, with cows grazing there, small as toys. ‘That’s the Cliff,’ says Meint.

The sound of clogs can be heard from behind the house. The father and the boy called Popke walk outside. ‘Meint, will you bring the bucket along for us?’ Meint jumps up and races to the shed. He swings the bucket through the air, then runs and catches up with the two men. The girl lets herself slide off the bench and limps wailing after them through the meadow. She comes to a halt at the gate which the boy has climbed over and kicks angrily at the bars. Then she lets herself fall down on the grass.

I see the woman in her dark clothes rushing across the meadow. Her size and the speed with which she is moving have something intimidating about them. She drags the girl to her feet and propels her back to the house. By the shed she gives the sobbing child a slap round the ears and shakes her furiously. ‘You scamp, always the same carry-on. Things can’t be the way you want them all the time.’ She thrusts the shrieking girl in my direction. ‘Whatever must this boy be thinking, he’s never heard the likes of it.’

The girl scrambles back up on the bench next to me. I notice she has two big new front teeth. On either side there are gaps and the rest of her teeth are brown and uncared for. She kicks against the bench and the iron brace around her thin little leg makes a clanking sound with each kick. With every clank I shut my eyes. What would my father be doing now in Amsterdam?

I feel misery closing in on all sides, in the emptiness, in the outbursts, in the aimless sitting and waiting: it rushes through the pastures, it howls and screeches, it disappears behind the dyke swinging a bucket. Suddenly I am dying to find out where the woman has put my suitcase, I long to open it and to hold the familiar things from home in my hands. I must stow all of it safely away so that no one can find it. But I don’t know whether I’m allowed back in the house. Should I go and ask?

The oldest girl is busy cleaning the pans in the shed. The mother is nowhere to be seen. I walk back to the gate. Is every day going to be like this one? I can smell the sickly sweet smell of manure blowing on the wind. Everything around me is green and remote. When the sun breaks through the clouds for a moment, I suddenly see lighter patches and the brown of the roofs, the wall of our house lit up bright yellow. The girl is sitting sulking on the bench, her head hunched between her shoulders, and she is making angry kicking movements with her leg in the air.

Towards evening the men come back, their hands reeking of fish and petrol. With a triumphant roar Meint puts the bucket down on the little stone path. Dozens of gleaming, grey slimy eels are writhing together in apparent panic. They have pointed heads and staring, cold little snakes’ eyes. I look spellbound at the squirming tangled ball.

Half an hour later the father holds a wildly wriggling eel between his fingers. With one deft movement he cuts off its head, as you would snip a flower from its stalk. He throws the suddenly severed body into a bucket of water where to my horror, it continues to move. The bloody stump of a head disappears into a newspaper.

I turn round and walk away, but a moment later I am back squatting by the bucket again, staring at the desperately writhing mass of pain.

I stand shivering in the little shed, waiting to wash in a tub the woman has filled at the pump. When I had got up in the morning, she had first inspected the cupboard-bed suspiciously, patting the mattress with the flat of her hand. I felt deeply ashamed.

On my first night here she had opened two small doors in the living room to reveal a cupboard-like space fitted out as a bed, all safe and snug. When I was getting undressed and had started to take off my underwear, she had objected. ‘No, we keep that on here, else it’s much too cold. Just put your pyjamas on over them.’ It had felt strange, going to bed with two layers of clothes, one on top of the other.

Meint and I slept in the same cupboard-bed. I shoved over as far as possible towards the wall so that there was room between us. The small doors were closed, leaving just a chink. The voices in the room had sounded far off and yet very near, as if someone were mumbling into my ear. I thought of home, submerged under the bedclothes, immersed in warmth and hush, in the grip of thoughts that kept me from sleep. And yet this had been the happiest time of the whole day: I didn’t have to say anything or see anybody. I lay tucked away safely in the dark and for the time being no one was going to come and take me away. This warm spot was where I belonged.

The three girls sleep in the cupboard-bed next to ours, the other one in the corner by the small window is for the parents. ‘You’ve got Popke’s place,’ Meint said, ‘he’s better off sleeping up in the loft. There’s more air up there.’

We listened to the voices in the room. Was Meint cross with me for taking his brother’s place? I tried to tell from the sound of the whispering voice which cracked hoarsely and huskily. ‘I’ve got to go to school tomorrow. You’re to come too, Hait says. We’ve only just started again.’

School… It had never occurred to me that I would have to go to school here as well, that the teaching, the testing, and the homework would go on as usual, unchanged, just like at home.

When the light in the room went out – the woman gave a noisy blow and I smelt the penetrating oil fumes that cut sharp as a knife through the dark – I could hear, besides Meint’s breathing and the creaking from the other cupboard-beds, the wind sucking along the walls of the house, a persistent, swelling, threatening noise. I was lying in a little boat that was being tossed about on strange seas, slipping through dark tunnels and tacking across unfathomable deeps, moving further and further away from the familiar mainland.

I woke up with a start in the night. It took a little time before I knew where I was. I had dreamt of home: my mother was sitting bent over forward in a corner of the room, her face buried in her hands. My father was standing by the window and I was suspended just outside, floating in the air. He was trying to get hold of me, but whenever his hands nearly touched me, I swerved away. ‘You must get in Frits’s car,’ he shouted, and I could see that ‘Frits’ was down below in front of the door, hanging out of the car window and gesturing upwards, grinning. My mother dashed out onto the balcony, hauled me in like a balloon on a string and wrapped her arms around me protectively. The two of us were crying, and my Clothes gradually became soaked through…

I woke up with a start. A strange boy, breathing audibly as if short of air, was asleep next to me. It was cramped in the bed, the cupboard seemed filled with stale air: I had to get out or I would suffocate.

Through the chink between the small doors I could see a bit of the dark room, gleaming black and still. Something was wrong, but what? I touched my pyjama trousers and felt that I hey were wet. How was that possible, how could that have happened? My clothes were soaked, and feeling round me I discovered that the mattress, too, was damp. Without making a sound, I edged as close as possible to the wall to find a dry spot, and then cautiously, so as not to wake Meint, pushed my wet clothes down to my ankles.

Did you have to fold your hands when you wanted to pray, wouldn’t it work otherwise? I laced my damp fingers together: Please, God, let everything be dry by tomorrow.

But it isn’t dry next morning.

The woman turns down the bed while I stand guiltily by, one bare foot on the other. ‘He’s wet his bed,’ she calls out in horror. She smells the sheets and a moment later walks out of the room, her arms full of bedding, a disgusted expression on her face. ‘Do you do that at home all the time? You really should have warned me. Your mother could have sent a note, couldn’t she?’

No, I did not wet my bed at home. I had done it once for quite a long time, we had always kept it a secret, my mother and I, even from Daddy… But that must have been at least five years ago.

At breakfast I make myself as small as possible and I’m sure they are all giving me a wide berth, they are all disgusted with me. I get the feeling I shall never be able to put this right, that I have spoiled everything. Wetting the bed, not going to church, not praying aloud, losing my registration card – I really am a terrible failure.

‘What will become of you?’ my mother had often said when I came home with bad marks from school. ‘You’ll end up a pigswill man.’ Then I would take a good look at the stinking wagon that drove through our street at noon. Jute sacks hung down from the back of the cart, filled with something undefined and horrible, and oozing long dribbling sticky threads. The man who collected the baskets of potato peel wore pig’s wash-stained overalls and large rubber boots, as he sat, legs wide apart, on the box, slapping the skinny back of his horse with the reins. Would I be sitting up there next to him one day?

I wash my face over the tub, scrubbing desperately, but tears of humiliation keep coming.

For some reason or other I do not have to go to school that day. The woman is so annoyed that she doesn’t deign to glance in my direction, and Jantsje and Meint go off to their lessons without me. She tidies up the room in silence. I miss the father, but presumably he had gone very early out to sea.

I sit about on the chair by the window for a while, then trail aimlessly through the house. I am profoundly miserable. The morning seems as if it’s never coming to an end, but finally it is noon, everyone is back home again and there are large pans of food standing on the table. They all seem to have forgotten the bed-wetting, they seem even to have forgotten that I am here, they keep talking to each other and pay no attention to me. Right in the middle of the meal, I suddenly have to rush out to the w.c. behind the house. When Diet comes to see what has happened to me, she finds me slumped over sideways in the little wooden privy.

‘He’s got the runs,’ she says, leading me back inside. ‘He’d better lie down for a bit.’

From inside the cupboard-bed I can hear them muttering about me. ‘Townsfolk aren’t used to proper food any longer, they’ve hardly got anything left. His stomach has got to get used to it first.’ But the mother protests vociferously. She is convinced now that she’s been landed with a freak of a boy when what she’d asked for all along was a girl for her Pieke! Feverish, I doze off.

Chapter 4

In the morning the grass is silver and the dew makes my socks wet. Lifting my knees high, I walk through the meadow. Meint is standing by the gate, his hair standing up in unruly tufts, a crease from his pillow running across his cheek. It is a quarter past eight, my first school day.

‘You need clogs, man, shoes are no good around here.’ My shoes are shabby and down-at-heel, the wet leather speckled with grass seed. I stamp the seeds off on the road.

‘Aren’t you going to wave to Mem?’ asks the girl. I can see the woman standing behind the window and warily raise my hand to her. I know this twisting and turning road we’re on now. Two days ago, I passed along it on a bicycle, perched behind the stranger. A road of unending loneliness.

The farmhouses are large and self-contained, noble fortresses. Every so often the wind carries the smell of smouldering wood and the sound of voices from a stable. A woman walks through a farmyard and calls something to us in a piercing voice. Meint points out the cows looming up through veils of low-hanging mist, their backs suspended mysteriously, ghostlike above the ground.

During the walk, I have to stop a few times. My breakfast comes spurting out in slimy white clots that land back onto my clothes because of the wind. I bend over, with tears in my eyes, fretting with anxiety as Jantsje and Meint look on in amazement.

The school is still a long way off, more than half an hour’s walk. Sick to my stomach, I walk along the village street. We pass the church and suddenly I recognise a small structure.

‘The Sunday school,’ says Meint and Jantsje pulls a face. For a moment I look up hoping the lorry may still be there, tucked away in some corner hidden from view. Or maybe it will be coming back to deliver the next batch of children. I must keep an eye on this place, I mustn’t let any opportunity slip by.

There is a low building just past the crossroads with a small yard in front. Resignedly I follow Meint and Jantsje through the waiting children. There are curious glances and Meint looks proud: ‘He’s come from the city to live with us.’

The low building has just four classrooms, tall, stark places with grey-painted walls, no pictures or drawings, nothing.

Plain and empty.

The windows start high up the walls and the window-sills are bare. It is as if everyone abandons this place as quickly as possible after school. I think of our White School in Amsterdam, the sun and the plants which the teacher carefully tends, pinching out the overblown flowers.

I stop at the door and watch as the schoolmaster comes in and walks up to the window. He tugs at a rope and a small window at the top swings open with a big bang. I catch my breath. He beckons me imperiously with a crooked finger and points to a seat at the back. In front of me I see Meint’s familiar head. There are some eight or ten children in the class, each with a desk to himself. It’s a strange school: between the two classrooms is a door that stays open so that the master can give lessons to two classes at once. I hear his voice through the door, and another window being swung open. When we pray – the master standing in the doorway, head bowed – the silence of the village floats in over us through the open windows. The class is taking dictation while I look on. There is a girl who isn’t doing anything either, I know her from the lorry. You can tell from her clothes that she’s from the city because her dress is colourful and gaudy in comparison with the other girls’. It’s just as if she and I were wearing our Sunday best for school. Now and then she gives me a reproachful look. I’d like to get to know her, but have no idea how to set about it. Should I give her some sort of sign perhaps?

The master delivers his lesson slowly and drowsily, there seems no ending to it. The incomprehensible sound of his voice makes me tired and I try to smother my yawns and pretend to be looking for something in the little locker under my desk.

We troop outside in small, silent groups. Break. There is no shoving, no shouting, no laughing. Everything is orderly and grown up.

We walk up and down the yard for a while, some walking with the master, others waiting patiently by the school wall until they can go back in.

There are no houses behind the school, you can look right across the fields as far as the sea-dyke. I can see the hilltop of the Cliff rising upwards. The bleak landscape, open and without secrets, the emptiness blowing in to meet you.

When we go back into the classroom Jan has suddenly, mysteriously, appeared out of nowhere. I leap up at my desk and try excitedly to attract his attention. Jan is my mainstay, the two of us together will be able to run away from here and get back home. And if we come across Greet)e from Bloedstraat we can take her along too. I can just see it, three children roaming through the countryside in search of their home. Like in a book.

Jan is put at the desk in front of me. His self-assured eyes glance briefly in my direction, but there is no recognition in his look or pleasure at our unexpected reunion.

T think all the evacuees are here now,’ says the master. What has happened to the rest, I wonder, where have they got to? Swallowed up in the far reaches of these lonely parts? We have to write down our names and ages on a piece of paper and the names of the families who are putting us up. Without so much as glancing at them, the master puts the papers on his table and goes through into the other class.

To the amazement of the others in the room, Jan immediately turns around in his seat. He smiles at me and starts to talk. I shrink back and signal ‘sh!’ with my finger. We mustn’t draw attention to ourselves straight away. That could ruin our plans.

‘What a filthy walk it is to this place. I couldn’t find it at all at first. They won’t be seeing me here very often, believe me.’ He looks around the classroom. ‘Backward dump. What on earth do you think we’re going to learn here, not a lot, that’s for sure!’

I look at his insolent expression and jerkily-moving head. As he talks he puckers his freckled nose, and his tongue darts rapidly across his lips as if he is gulping something down.

‘I’m on a big farm. It’s great, lots to do. They’ve got two small children. I’m going to ask them to let me skip school. I’d much sooner help with the animals.’ He gives a snort. ‘Where have they stuck you? Here, in the village?’ He pulls me over towards him and whispers in my ear, ‘I’m sure you could come and stay with me. I’ll ask them at home.’

The master appears in the door and glowers into the classroom. His eyes are dull and disapproving. T can see three new faces,’ he says. ‘From the city, from Amsterdam. Perhaps you are all used to something else at school there, but here there is no talking during my absence. If you don’t understand something, you put up your hand. And I think…’ he seizes my collar and marches me to a desk at the very front, ‘I think it is better if you don’t sit too close together.’

His footsteps echo emphatically through the classroom. He draws the curtains to dim the sunlight which is streaming through the open window. ‘I take it you come from a Christian school?’

I make a movement with my head that I hope can mean ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

‘Where did we get to two days ago, Jochum?’

A boy with very short blond hair and dressed in blue overalls stands up. ‘Deutonomy, master.’

‘Good try, my boy. The Book of Deuteronomy. Moses’ last sermon.’ He reads out a piece from the book, keeps silent for a moment while he looks around the class, and says, ‘Moses is the Old Testament, Jesus the New. Which one of you can tell me the names of the Apostles? I ask because I would like to make willing apostles out of all of you, propagators of the Holy Word and of Our Lord’s Gospel.’

It is quiet in the classroom. I think of Jan, I want to turn around and look at his familiar face. The teacher’s finger points in my direction. ‘You over there, the new boy. What’s your name?’

‘Jeroen, sir.’

‘I’m no sir, we don’t have any sirs around here. I’m called master, so call me that in future, if you don’t mind.’ He looks for the paper on which I have written my name. ‘Oh, with the Vissers, in Laaxum,’ he reads out. ‘Lucky for you, boy, a fine family. Not so, Meint?’

Meint goes red in the face, his answer is hoarse.

‘Well, Jeroen, so you’ve been to a Christian school. Can you tell me the names of the Lord Jesus’ disciples then?’

In Amsterdam I went to Sunday school a few times round about Christmas time, because they used to give you some sweets and a small present. Sometimes I came home with a small coloured print that had a text written on the back. I had always stored such treasures away in a metal box for safekeeping. ‘Holy cards,’ Mummy had laughed, ‘we were given those too, once upon a time.’ I look around the classroom. The children are staring at me curiously, except for Jan who sits at his desk with a vacant smile, legs spread wide, his hands tightly gripping his bare knees.

I take a leap in the dark, as one might jump into the sea, nostrils pinched tightly together. ‘Joseph,’ I begin, for that is a name I remember clearly, ‘David, Moses, and Paul, uh…’ But that makes just four. Ought I to have added Jesus as well? I hear nervous sniggers and can see Meint looking down at the floor in embarrassment.

The master walks to the communicating door and says to the other class with a triumphant ring to his voice, ‘Jantsje, that new member of your family doesn’t seem to know very much. Can you tell him the names of the twelve apostles?’

From the other room, sounding hollow and as far away as the bottom of an echoing well, I can hear Jantsje’s light little voice smoothly reel off a list of names. ‘And who betrayed Jesus?’

‘Judas, master.’ A chorus of voices.

I hope that Jantsje and Meint won’t tell on me at home. I am terribly ashamed, my ears are burning. Judas, I ought to have known that name. And curse my luck, right in front of the class. Now I’ll always be picked on first, you wait and see.

The master stands in the doorway between the two classes. ‘Let us pray.’ Uncertainly I fold my hands under the desk. I can feel the master watching me closely. It’s as if I were telling a lie just by folding my hands.

‘Oh Lord Our God,’ I hear, ‘we thank You for this morning, in which You have once again allowed us to be together. We beseech You, oh Lord, to bless us, and our new classmates also. And we beseech You, Lord, to bless the families of these children, families who are suffering hunger and want, who are sick and dying for lack of food, lack of succour and lack of hope. Grant this, oh Lord.’

Behind me, I can hear stifled sobs and I become aware of an achingly desolate feeling breaking loose inside me.

‘And who are suffering the blackest and most bitter circumstances. Remember them, Lord, and lend them Your infinite, never-ceasing strength and succour.’

It is beating up inside me in waves, slamming through me with deafening booms. It will not be held back. In jolting heaves the despair erupts from my mouth, my eyes, my nose, retching waves of dribbling, snivelling sorrow. I am like some alien invalid, someone who no longer has control over his body and is in the throes of grotesque and humiliating convulsions. I can hear my sorrow raging through the astonished silence of the classroom.

‘You two stay right where you are.’ I can tell that the master is speaking in my direction. ‘The rest of you may go.’

Now the master will give me a friendly and understanding talk, he will console me and tell me that it won’t be as bad as all that, that Amsterdam will be spared sickness, hunger and death. And he’ll forgive me for the apostles as well. The master stands right in front of me. In vain I wipe my nose on my sleeve but the snot keeps on coming.

‘You have just proved that you lack faith in the Lord,’ he says brusquely. He looks at the girl and at me as if there is something repugnant about us. ‘That was wicked of you, a bad example to your classmates. And it is also most ungrateful to the people here who have taken you into their homes so lovingly. If anything like this should ever happen again,’ he sticks his hands into his brown dustcoat and nods curtly, ‘then I shall feel obliged to talk to your foster parents about it.’ He gives an angry cough. ‘That’s all for now. But don’t you forget it.’

We slide out of our desks and disappear from the room. The girl’s reproachful gaze is red and tear-stained now. We say nothing to each other and walk across the playground and up the road without a word. I look for Jan.

Warmth seeps down between the branches of the trees, and I breathe in the strong summer smells: grass, dung and fat, well-fed cattle. The light is dazzling. Meint is standing at a corner waiting patiently for me. I run up to him with relief: the first sign of brotherhood!

Chapter 5

I seal the envelope carefully. I’ll post it tomorrow on my way to school.

I didn’t say anything about my little brother, nor about my wetting my bed.

Chapter 6

I don’t know why, but Sundays are the hardest. On the one hand it’s all very nice: Sunday breaks the dull monotony of ordinary weekdays and is the only day when the constant bustle in the house lets up for a little bit, as if all of us need a chance to get our breath back.

But it is difficult to say whether or not that makes up for church and Sunday school. Some Sundays are downright awful, but on others I get the feeling that I am being nicely uplifted and helped to look at everything through different eyes. When that happens, I step out of the church service with a lovely feeling, as if wings were growing under my shirt: God is merciful and everything will turn out fine in the end, including even me!

At meals we all sit down together, and most weeks Trientsje, the daughter who works at the farm, comes back home on Saturday evening and spends the night. She is like a gentle, warm-hearted mother, smoothing away all the sharp corners of my life. I can feel her deep care and concern, ‘Jeroen, have you had enough to eat?’ ‘Don’t fret, things at home are certain to be going well.’ ‘Meint, leave the boy in peace just for once!’

On Sunday morning we are all allowed to get up a little later. Hait stays in bed the longest of all, so we speak in hushed voices and tread cautiously through the room. The girls lay the table without a sound and cut the doughy wartime bread into crumbling, crustless slices untidily arranged on a shiny white plate. Mem brings a wooden board up from the cellar with a piece of cooked ham on it and a stone dish with a wet and sagging sheep’s cheese she has made herself.

Everyone is wearing their Sunday clothes, neatly creased and smelling of camphor. We are all scrubbed clean with slicked-down hair, spick and span, as if we were waiting to pose for a family photograph.

I am wearing Meint’s clothes because Mem says that the things I brought with me from Amsterdam are unsuitable for going to church. ‘Much too gaudy.’ I sniff at the sleeves: moth balls, sheep’s cheeses and God, all of them go inseparably and solemnly together, it is the smell of Sunday.

We wait around the table, my eyes travelling greedily over the mouthwatering display of food. My first dislike of fatty things has made way for a kind of gluttony. We wait for Hait, no one touching anything. He comes through the door, glossily shaved. Because he does not put his shirt on until just after breakfast, he is in his vest, his thin yet strong arms sticking out of the short sleeves. He closes the door with care and takes time to survey us all with a gentle smile. This is the first rite of Sunday, the return of the father to partake of our food with us.

‘Right, children, eat up now.’

With an approving look he watches his oldest daughter handing out the slices of bread and pouring tea from a grey enamel kettle. Grace has descended, it seems, I can feel it deep down inside me.

Mem sits with her arms folded across her heavy breasts. This is her free morning and she radiates contentment because of it. Every so often she shifts her false teeth about a little, her way of signalling that all’s well with her world and that she is allowing herself to drift away into pleasant reveries. Fascinated, I watch out for the moment when she pushes her lower teeth out, for then it looks just as if she were sticking her tongue out at us and smirking at the same time. Whenever she catches me spying on her like this she nods at me with her head on one side and closes her eyes for a moment. For all I can tell, she is winking at me.

That’s the best thing about Sunday, Mem’s transformation: he turns into a benevolent and uncomplaining mound of peacefulness from which all the furious weekday wrangling has slipped away.

After breakfast we go to church with Hait, the girls carrying hymn books, the boys walking in front, side by side. When we are in the road opposite the house, we wave to Mem who, large and dark, fills the whole of one of the windows and raises a languid arm, as if we were a ship that has put out to sea leaving the safe harbour behind.

In Hait’s company the walk to the village seems much shorter. He tells us stories about where he used to work and points out who lives where. If Pieke comes along, Jantsje pushes the disabled girl along on the bicycle next to Hait while lie tells her stories and makes jokes.

We wait among the people in the church porch to be let in. I inhale the smell of their Sunday clothes and the eau de cologne of the older women, trying to keep close to them for as long as possible because the smell reminds me of the time my grandma came to visit us in Amsterdam, when she would open her handbag and give me an acid drop.

Going into the church makes my heart and my throat throb, as if I am about to go on stage. To the low humming of the organ I walk up the aisle, my hands crossed reverently in front of my stomach. If, as I move past, I catch the eye of I people already seated in their pews, I nod to them gravely and they nod graciously back, while the prelude-playing organ fills the church with a familiar sense of fellow-feeling. I have the impression that I have been singled out to do something heroic, God looking down on me from the heights and thinking, ‘Any minute now I shall work a miracle through him.’ Gooseflesh shoots across my arms and back and my neck tightens with suspense. We slip into one of the pews. There are small cushions lying about and at every place there Is a black hymn book. I look up to see if I can spot Hait who had disappeared outside across the churchyard and round the back of the church. Trientsje opens her psalter for me and places it silently on my lap. She points with a stiff, proud finger to the words scribbled in the front: ‘For my daughter Trijntje. On her sixteenth birthday. Hait.’

At the back of the church the doors are closed noisily and the organ falls silent. I can hear the sound of the bells outside dying away, thinning out raggedly to a whisper. Through a small door at the front of the church a group of men walk inside in a row, one behind the other. Immediately the shuffling and coughing is hushed, which means that these men must be very important people. With a jolt of pride I see that Hait is with them. I watch him sit down in the pew beside the pulpit, next to the schoolmaster and the man who brought me to Laaxum on the bicycle.

‘Who are those men? What are they going to do?’

‘Elders,’ whispers Meint. ‘They’ll be collecting money in a minute.’

The shirt Meint is wearing is frayed at the edges and has been patched with pale blue material. He looks ill at ease in the buttoned-up shirt: instead of just his head he turns his whole body towards me as if his back hurts.

The minister has a young, unwrinkled face above a chalk-white pair of starched bands. He wears thin, gold-rimmed spectacles which he pushes up his nose with a finger. He has come in without my noticing, and stands there in his full, black garb like an apparition. Without looking at anyone he walks quickly in a half-circle around to the short flight of steps to the pulpit, places a small book next to the large open Bible and looks out over the congregation attentively.

I wonder if he has seen me, if he realises that I am new. Perhaps ministers know everything. I make myself small and cast my eyes down. Just don’t let him call me out of the pew.

‘Dear people, let us pray…’ All this praying has become torture for me: we pray before and after every meal, at school and before we go to bed. I entreat food and health for those at home, I implore for a letter from them, I invoke their deliverance from death. The most repellent and shocking images pass before my shut eyes, visions I conjure up and no longer know how to banish.

The minister reads out passages from the Bible and after that he holds forth, endlessly and incomprehensibly. Interminable, dreary boredom.

I look at the tall elongated windows through which I can see branches and a piece of the sky and a swallow that swoops twittering in through one window and out of the other. Do the others notice as well, do they see it, or am I the only one watching its nimble flight? Unerringly the little bird darts out through the narrow gap to cut through the blue sky, and I wait patiently to see through which window it will return.

‘Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core. These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots…’

Streams of disjointed words without meaning, pouring out unstoppably, phrases that baffle me and turns of speech that make me first giddy and then sleepy. How much longer will he go on, surely he can’t keep talking for ever? Clouds move by in the blue sky and the leaves on the branches are beginning to rustle. It won’t be long before it rains.

If I stare at the minister long enough perhaps that will make him stop, perhaps he’ll realise then that enough is enough. I glance at the faces all around me, weather-beaten, tired, rapt. They listen with a kindly, childlike attention that looks like wonder. Do they really understand it all, and is that because I hey have heard these words all their life?

They sing: dour, dragging melodies played through first by the organ, then fumbled through routinely by the congregation. Meint holds the text in the little book up to me and I try to sing along looking as natural as possible. Sometimes my voice goes suddenly in the wrong direction, an unexpectedly loud sound, an incongruous and blatant discord. I grope for the right tune, floundering helplessly among the notes, and in the end do nothing but move my lips industriously. Perhaps the minister will not hear my mistakes, though the master may well have told him about them already. Moses, Joseph, David…

With the next bit of the sermon I am suddenly back home in Amsterdam, looking stealthily at a book with an exciting illustration: a woman without clothes is sitting down and bending forward, her white flesh making fat, soft, curves. Behind her, two old men are standing with surly, furtive expressions. One holds his chin reflectively, the other places a surreptitious hand on the woman’s bare belly. ‘Susanna and the Two Elders’ it said underneath and I hear these very words in the sermon.

The men at the front of the church are called elders. How can that be? Could those men, and could Hait…? I can’t imagine that, him doing it to Mem, those bony hands on a round, bare belly. Why do they talk about that sort of thing in church?

At the end of the sermon the elders walk one behind the other down the central aisle. They stick out black pointed velvet bags on long handles and people put their hands into them. The men shake the little bags and the jingling of money rings through the church.

I put in the cents Mem gave us when we left home. At first I had thought I would keep the money, it would prove useful for our escape, but then God might have seen it and punished me. When my coins jingle I look up: You see, God, my money is inside.

The sticks move on through the church like scythes, making greedy, poking movements, fingers pointing at each successive victim. An ill-omened, avaricious dance of death.

I squeeze out of the church and breathe in the smell of the meadows.

When we are walking back home, back to Mem, back to dinner, my life seems happy, light and carefree. I see everything through brand new, clean-washed eyes, as if I were looking down from a cloud and watching everyone, myself included, walking down the road like small, contented insects.

When we leave the road and start to cross the meadows, I can already smell the food. Mem stands waiting for us by the door and as soon as we are inside she begins to move pans .Hid dishes about. On Sunday her cooking is always a little bit Special: there are gooseberries in a bowl, or cooked apples, bid sometimes warm buttermilk porridge with syrup.

If it is buttermilk porridge then my Sunday is very nearly spoiled, the smell alone makes me feel sick. And if, following persistent urging, I take a mouthful, all my good resolutions carried away from the sermon vanish together with that spoonful of sour-sweet, slimy sludge.

‘Go on, eat up,’ says Mem, ‘it’s good for you, it’ll make a man out of you.’

Heavy and full of food we go back to church in the afternoon. Most Sundays Mem comes along as well. It is the only day in the week she ever leaves Laaxum.

After the afternoon service, which seems even more incomprehensible than the one in the morning and spreads a sleepy boredom over us all, the children go on to Sunday school while the parents visit friends or promenade up and down the village street. Downcast, and with a bitter taste of helplessness in my throat, I sit in the gloomy, damp little building with the cast-iron windows. I look at the spot where I sat that first morning, at the cupboard with the folded clothes, the table where the driver sat. It is a classroom filled with the memory of the group of waiting children with troubled, grubby faces.

Weary, grumpy or resigned, we allow a fresh stream of religious learning to wash over us. All the while I keep thinking of Jan, of how he left this place without so much as a glance in my direction. Why did my father ever allow me to leave home, to end up with this lonely existence, stumbling about as I vainly try to find my feet? And how can I be sure that things won’t go on like this for evermore, that the war won’t continue for years and years?

I am filled with anger and resentment against my new home, against this life with its endless sanctimony concerning eternity, sin and redemption, trickling its way drop by drop, word by word, into my weary head. Dispirited and beleaguered I try not to let anything more filter through to me, try to cut myself off from the monotonous voice, the booming bellow, the echoing drone.

When Pieke sees us coming back home she runs staggering across the field, her little arms flailing the air helplessly. ‘Just look at that,’ says Jantsje, ‘she can’t wait.’ Rebellion and impotence grate inside me. Bells keep ringing in my head, my eye sockets feel hollow and empty. I no longer want to live. Why do I have to go on with it all? Drained, I cross the road and watch Pieke, that maimed bit of life who, shamelessly disregarding the day of rest, is making her way towards us with flailing arms, distracted with joy.

Chapter 7

The red cliff rises from the flat land like a strange growth. From Laaxum the path runs along in the lee of the sea dyke and then up the slope of the Cliff to the top. At the highest point you can look far across the countryside, you can see Laaxum and Scharl, where Jan lives. Much further towards I lie horizon, the steeple of Warns church sticks up, and to the lilt, where the dyke makes way for a mass of tiny roofs, masts and treetops, lies Stavoren. Everything seems small and still. The sea, which makes up the other half of the view, puts an abrupt end to the all but treeless stretches of pasture, the dyke creating a sharp divide between the green land and brownish-black water.

As you stand there, right on top of the rise, you are sometimes filled with a sudden feeling of freedom, a tingling of happiness and adventure. The sea breeze is clean and bright and everything appears well laid-out and clear-cut: roads, fences and ditches form regular patterns and connections, one leading naturally to the next.

That unforgettable moment when enlightenment seizes you only to vanish again just as inexplicably, the moment for which you search as for a dream that has been swept away ,and yet is still present, locked away deep inside yourself.

It is coming up to the end of September but the weather is still warm and sultry. The walk from Laaxum to the Red Cliff has made us so hot that our faces are damp and sticky. We have been chasing each other along the way, shrieking with laughter, gasping for breath, up dyke, down dyke, and now we are clambering up the path feeling guilty: we are sure to be too late.

Jan is sitting waiting for us at the topmost point of the Cliff, looking unconcerned. I sense the annoyance behind his imperturbable air. ‘I thought you were never going to turn up,’ he says, looking past us over the landscape and yawning. ‘Do you lot still want to do something?’ He says ‘you lot’ but looks straight at me with a mixture of mockery and contempt. ‘I’ve been sitting here for half an hour. There was work I could have been doing in the stables.’

Shamefaced, we say nothing, even Meint keeping his mouth shut.

Jan takes a few steps away from us and looks down the slope. I cringe: now he’s going to go away, a precious afternoon with Jan has been lost. ‘Let’s see if the water’s still nice. First one in,’ he calls out even while he is racing down.

Boisterously we career after him, Pieke sliding on her bottom, shrieking with laughter.

Jan stands waiting for us below. He has kicked off his clogs and now struggles quickly out of his trousers. Jantsje stops in her tracks and turns round to Pieke, who is trailing far behind. Our voices ring out clearly in the warm air. I sit down in the tall grass and look at Jan. He has a yellow spot on his underpants. The sea makes cool, alluring noises along the stones.

An hour later I watch them walking down the sloping path again. Their blonde hair sticks out in spikes and I can clearly see wet patches on their backs and bottoms. Pieke is hobbling wearily between Meint and Jantsje, wailing for the support of an arm no one gives her. In any case, they’re off home and I am finally alone with Jan.

‘Why don’t you all go back,’ I had suggested. ‘Jan wants to talk something over with me. About Amsterdam. We want to go back there one of these days.’ I had made it sound important on purpose, almost whispering the last few words, like a secret message. Then I had raced back down the Cliff, taking reckless giant’s leaps, uncontrolled, half falling over, the grass lashing my knees.

Jan sits motionless on a slab of stone, his face towards the Bea. He swivels a length of rope through the air, but it is as if his arm doesn’t belong to him and is leading a circling life of Its own. For a while we sit silently, side by side, Jan a few paces away from me. I am afraid to interrupt his swivelling game and wait patiently. The sun burns my shoulders and makes me feel drowsy and languid. I listen to the buzzing of insects flying from flower to flower. The water laps idly between the stones.

‘Take off your shirt, it’ll dry more quickly,’ says Jan.

He has put his own in the grass behind him. His bare swivelling arm is thin and wiry. Leaning back he tries to dig up some grass with his toes, then kicks the grass away in a .mall arc. Slowly he stands up and gives me a searching look. ‘Did you see Jantsje in her underwear?’

I pretend not to hear and fiddle with my toenails.

‘When she was wet you could see everything. Or were you too scared to look?’ He walks a bit further off and pees into the sea in a wide arc, legs far apart. ‘Did you see how far I got? That’s muscles, boy.’ He flexes his arm, shows me a small round bump and pinches it with obvious satisfaction.

All five of us had been swimming and Jan and I are now trying to get our soaked things dry before we go back home.

When I had run up the slope with the other three, I had put on my shirt, hoping that my vest would dry underneath all the same. I find it suddenly odd to expose myself half-dressed to his pitiless gaze. A little earlier, when he had been shooting through the water on nimble, supple, frog’s legs, Jan, spluttering and tossing his hair, had made fun of my skinny body. Jantsje and Meint had been splashing about clumsily at the water’s edge and I had stayed close to Pieke, who was clinging tightly to a big rock, letting herself down into the water little by little. She had shrieked each time she touched something unexpectedly with the soles of her feet, and needed our constant attention.

I had looked at Jan’s glistening arms and legs as he came up out of the water and waded dripping wet towards us. Every part of his slender body displayed burgeoning strength, and his bearing was self-assured. With surprise and envy I watched him acting like a much older boy, swaggering about as he demonstrated the backstroke. He waded closer still and blew snot out of a nostril with a practised air. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘spindleshanks.’ He grabbed hold of me and tried to push me under the water, one knee placed firmly on my chest. I had come up half-choking and fled to the shore.

‘See that over there?’ Jan waves his rope in the direction of the sea where two thick round shapes in the distance are sticking above the surface of the water. ‘That’s the wheels of a plane. British. Shot down by the Jerries. The pilots are still inside, I’m not kidding.’

I turn my head away. We’d been swimming in that water only a quarter of an hour ago, and Meint had said, pointing to the two mysterious curves in the water, ‘Who dares swim out to that?’

No one had dared, of course. Not even Jan.

In my imagination I can see the two Englishmen sitting upside down in the water, still wearing their caps and mica goggles. They rock and sway about slackly with the current, like seaweed. One still clings to the joystick, his mouth hanging open while fish swim in and out. Their eyes in their goggles stare at the shore and watch our legs splashing exuberantly through the water…

Jan saunters back and turns his shirt over in the grass. ‘Must get a bit more of a tan.’ He drops down full length, his brown knees sticking out above the tall green grass, his eyes screwed up tight against the sun.

‘Lovely Sunday tomorrow,’ he chants. ‘Lovely day off tomorrow.’ He turns over onto his stomach and stays there, arms and legs stretched out wide. I feel envious; he never seems to think of Amsterdam any more and looks completely at home here. I want to talk to him about our street, about our friends, but I am scared to. He is sure to say something sarcastic and laugh at me.

Once, when I had gone over to Scharl to find out what was wrong with Jan who hadn’t been to school for a whole week, the woman I met in the stables called out, ‘Jan, a visitor for you from Holland!’ Jan had come out dressed in dirty blue overalls and wearing muddy rubber boots. His hands were covered with cuts and scratches and he had a silly little cap on the back of his head that gave him a brash, old-for-his-years air. ‘Hullo. What are you doing here?’ He had given me a slightly incredulous look, as if he thought I was not quite right in the head.

‘Nothing. I was in the neighbourhood. So I thought to myself, why not see where Jan lives?’ I said it apologetically, as if I had done something that wouldn’t quite stand up to examination.

We were standing in the large, sunny farmyard, Jan plucking weeds out from between the stones with quick expertise, as if the yard belonged to him. Suddenly, I felt a townie all over again. What on earth was I doing here, what business did I have to be in this place? Jan had turned into a different person, taciturn and grown-up. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking around the place like a real farmer.

In Laaxum I had kept thinking about Jan, the mysterious, inaccessible Jan, the boy from my street. We would have so much to tell each other when we met, about our parents, the friends from our street, about how rotten it was for us here

‘D’you want to see around the stables?’

We had walked through the big doors and Jan busied himself raking some dry grass together with a pitchfork. Somewhere in a corner there was a goat, pulling impatiently at her rope, bleating like a crying child. Jan had squatted down to feel her udders.

‘Inflamed,’ he said, ‘that kid of hers bites the teat too hard.’

He scratched the animal lovingly between the horns and I felt a stab of jealousy.

For a while I stood there in the middle of the barn, totally redundant, looking on as Jan raked the fork to and fro, clouds of straw flying up in the air. ‘Well, so long then,’ I had said and Jan had raised a hand without looking up. ‘See you.’

‘Traitor,’ I had thought to myself as I walked outside, biting my lip hard. ‘Dirty, filthy traitor.’ I could have cried out with mortification.

Jan had stopped moving. I jump to my feet and race up the slope. The silence gives me a sense of great excitement: this is our afternoon. Jan is asleep and I am keeping watch, guarding him from danger.

At the top of the hill I look down at the sea which is covered with small white waves. Jan’s almost invisible body makes the shape of a cross in the grass. I let out a whoop, a shout like the ones we gave in the street in Amsterdam to call to one another in the evenings when we played cops and robbers or prisoners’ base. I see Jan raising his head.

‘Come on!’ I wave my arms and start leaping about like a madman. ‘Hey, hey, hey!’

He comes slowly up to the top, balancing with bare, outstretched arms. His body slanting forward and his head looking down, he takes huge steps.

‘Gosh, you’re so brown already.’

Jan wipes drops of sweat from his nose and lifts his arms into the air. Brown, scratched arms. He looks out over the yellow-green landscape, which he seems to be keeping at bay with a movement of his arm, like a general. He hitches up his sagging trousers and takes stock of the slope. ‘Let’s roll down.’ He gives me a playful shove. We had rolled down once before, but I had finished up at the bottom retching into the sea while the whole world seemed to spin in large circles around me.

I go and lie down at the edge of the slope. ‘Ready, steady… We’ll see who wins.’ I no longer care if it makes me sick, so long as we are together, so long as Jan plays with me.

‘Hang on, we’ll do it doubled, like this.’ He lies down on top of me and puts his arms around me. I can smell his acrid sweat. ‘Ready?’ He laughs and without any warning squeezes the breath out of me. Over we roll, slowly and lopsidedly, then faster and faster. Over and over I see Jan’s face against the blue sky and then against the dark grass. Our bodies bump into each other and I hear Jan catching his breath with excited laughter. I shut my eyes tight and cling to him as we drop like a stone into an unfathomable deep.

Stop, I think to myself, stop! and then we are lying still. Grass rustles and grey circles spin around in my head. I break into a sweat, feeling Jan’s body pressing stiflingly and stickily against me. He pants heavily into my ear. ‘Jesus,’ he sighs, ‘sweet Jesus.’ Are we never going to move again? Jan sits himself up and pins my arms to the ground. ‘Wanna fight?’ He smiles menacingly, his panting mouth half-open. He has straight teeth and a broad, glistening lower lip. ‘Wanna fight?’ I know about that game all right. I try cautiously to free myself from his iron grip. I realise that movement by stealth is more effective than fierce resistance. His arms at full stretch, he stares at me triumphantly. I twist about in vain and am ashamed of my cowardliness, of the humiliation. I don’t want to fight, I want Jan as a friend. But I also know that I can only be his real friend if I take up his challenge. ‘Mercy’, says Jan, ‘ask for mercy. Else I won’t let you go.’

‘Come on,’ I plead, ‘we were having such fun.’ With a lightning-like movement I try to wriggle out from under him, but Jan jerks my legs apart with his knees and starts to rub his body against mine. His smile has disappeared and he now has a look of deep concentration as he makes impatient, insistent movements with his hips. He is frightening me. ‘Hey, Jan. Listen…’ He isn’t listening to me. I can see his face above mine, his teeth clenched firmly together and his eyes shut. He has clamped his fingers around my wrists as if he wants to force my hands off. Suddenly he rolls over and kneels next to me. He pulls his trousers down and a stiff little shape swishes up with a slap against his belly.

The two of us stare in silence at the pale thing, raised like a warning finger. I can see the white belly between Jan’s dropped trousers and his pulled-up vest, a white, vulnerable belly. Jan’s prick looks strange, hard and straight with a shiny red rim on top. I wonder if it hurts and give a loud, convulsive swallow.

‘They say you’ve got to push and pull.’ Jan has suddenly become communicative. ‘It works if you do that.’ He begins to tug violently at the swollen thing. I have the feeling that I have ceased to exist, and turn away. What is he doing, what is the matter with him? I feel sorry for him. Is he ill, does he often go on like this? I press my forehead against the ground and inhale the sourish smell of the grass. What exactly was he trying to do? ‘It works if you push and pull,’ the words shoot through my head. What works? He has a secret he won’t tell me, won’t share with me because he thinks I am too childish, because I piss in my bed. When I turn back to him, Jan is standing up, tucking his shirt into his trousers. He holds a hand out to me and pulls me to my feet. ‘Let’s go.’

We trudge up the Cliff. There is no sign of the secret – Jan is his normal, easy-going self.

‘Have you heard anything from home?’

I did get a letter from Amsterdam. Mummy was back, my father had written, and all was well. Was I having a good time, was I staying with nice people? The lady with whom I lived had written to say that I had wet my bed. How had that come about, when I hadn’t done that at home for such a long time? And best regards to Jan, it was nice that we lived so close together. We ought to be pleased that we were away in Friesland because there was hardly anything left to eat in Amsterdam.

But all I can think of is the mysterious event that has just taken place. I am dying to know more, to ask questions. But Jan has suddenly turned tired and surly, he seems to have forgotten the whole thing.

Above, on the road, he stops. ‘So long,’ he says, ‘I’ll take a short cut here.’ He climbs over the fence beside the road and stands still on the other side, as if he were having second thoughts.

‘Come here,’ he says, beckoning brusquely. I walk over to the fence and Jan grabs hold of my throat with both hands. ‘Don’t you dare tell a soul that you’ve seen my prick,’ he whispers, ‘or you’ve had it.’ He pushes me back and runs away across the fields.

On the way back home I keep thinking of Jan’s vulnerable white belly and of the drowned airmen, suspended upside down in the water. Now and then I look around to see if Jan is still in sight. I feel like running after him. I have to protect him, make sure no one dares lay a hand on my friend. No one must ever get to know our secret.

A leaden stillness hangs over the meadows. The cows stand about listlessly on a bare, well-trodden patch where the farmer is about to milk them. It’s late, almost half past five. Hurriedly I race along the dyke.

Chapter 8

The minister’s wife is dead. Mem raises her arms up to heaven with a hoarse cry when she hears the bad news -someone from Warns had come running straight across the fields to our house and banged on the window like one possessed – and then stumbles back into a chair where she sits gasping for breath.

‘Go and fetch Hait,’ she calls to us children, as we stand speechless around her chair. But Jantsje has already rushed off, over the fences and up the road. Her clogs fling lumps of mud up in the air and in her zeal she nearly falls over several times.

At the midday meal Hait prays aloud for the deceased – ‘our dearly beloved and respected late friend,’ he calls her – and for the minister as well.

I had never seen much of the minister’s wife, who had always remained a mysterious and admired stranger in the village. The minister lived across the street from the church in a stately house, a house with stiff white curtains that hung there daintily without creases or stains, and with two flowerless plants on the windowsill, one in front of each pane of glass, exactly in the middle. Behind, you suspected cool rooms, no doubt spotlessly tidy at all times and smelling of beeswax, with gleaming linoleum floors in which the furniture would be reflected.

I had seen the lady occasionally in the garden, cutting roses or raking the gravel. We would make a point when we saw her of walking close alongside the fence and greeting her loudly and insistently. If she greeted us back we would feel a little as if some Higher Being had wished us good morning. She rarely came to church, which I thought a bit strange, but then she probably spoke to the minister so much about God during the week that she had less need for church than the rest of us.

I had learned – thanks in part to her – to tell when people looked ‘townish’. The minister’s wife had been townish: always in proper shoes, always in a smart Sunday dress, and her hair – symmetrical little waves lying like a kind of lid over her head instead of the farmer’s wives’ knot more usual here – was always impeccable. She looked older than the minister, grander: sometimes I thought she could easily have been his mother rather than his wife. The minister would occasionally make a little joke with us and, although his hair was grey, his face looked younger, smooth and carefree, with quick eyes behind gold-framed spectacles.

In Amsterdam, in our street, twins were born not so long ago in Kareltje’s house, next door to Jan. Kareltje’s father was in the police. Two weeks later the twins were dead. ‘On account of the war,’ said my mother, ‘it’s all those rotten Jerries’ fault.’ Two men in black had carried the tiny white boxes out in their arms, with Kareltje and his father and mother the only people following behind.

Appalled, I had watched the mystifyingly sad spectacle, half-hidden behind the front door because I was afraid to be seen staring so shamelessly from the front steps. Dying, what was that?

The day the minister’s wife is buried we are let off school and nobody does any work. We wait by the low church wall until the cortege, black and threatening, approaches, slowly, to the sound of frenziedly chiming church bells.

All the women walking behind the coffin have long black pieces of cloth hanging down from their hats to their waists. We can see Mem in the cortege, wearing her black church clothes and a black straw hat with a veil. I can make out her face through the black cloth, dim and wan. She seems overcome with grief and doesn’t look at us. ‘Mem,’ says Meint and I hear awe in his voice, ‘our Mem.’ I nod respectfully, and swallow.

The minister looks straight at us, to our surprise. He even gives a brief nod in our direction and smiles. I cannot conceive of Mem changing back into the usual loudly chattering, bustling housewife in our overcrowded little living room. I fully expect this death to have turned her, too, into a silent, motionless figure for good.

The children wait outside until the cortege is in the church, then we go in last and sit down at the very back. The church is so full that we can see almost nothing of what is happening at the front. ‘She’s next to the pulpit,’ says Popke, ‘there’s going to be a service first.’ I want to look for Hait and Mem, but am too ashamed to be seen peering around the church while she is lying there dead: what would she think of me?

When everyone stands up as the minister walks in, I look up tensely at the pulpit, unable to imagine what the minister is going to do next. What do you say when your wife has died? But a different minister gets up in the pulpit, a strange, ordinary-looking man who makes nervous gestures with jerky, disjointed waves of his arm. He keeps sipping water from a glass standing ready next to him. At one point he starts to cough convulsively, barking like a dog, and afterwards he looks out into the body of the church in consternation, as if thinking, What on earth was I saying just now?

I am disappointed, no, furious: what is this man doing in our minister’s place? Does he imagine he can take over his job, or that any of us are going to believe anything he might tell us? I watch him carefully. It looks as if his Bible is about to fall off the pulpit, and he can’t even preach. The lifeless, listless mumbling carries no further than the front pews.

Although I have never actually spoken to our minister, I have the feeling that we know each other well and that many things he says in church on a Sunday are meant, not for the whole village, but for me alone, to console me or to give me courage or simply to let me know that he understands me.

I would sometimes glow with pride and excitement when he looked in my direction during a sermon: you see, he’s making sure I’m there! During the hymns I often looked straight up at him to let him see that I was singing along at the top of my voice. I thought that the minister, just like myself, felt a bit of an outsider in the village, a duck out of water. Townish people are treated differently, they don’t really belong.

Sometimes I indulge in fantasies. I see myself rising suddenly out of my pew as the organ starts to play by itself, and all the swallows come flying in through the windows. Then I float up high in the church on beams of golden light, my arms spread wide. I am wearing flimsy white clothes that flutter in the wind and there are voices raised in songs of praise. I am drifting on these voices. They lift me up while the swallows circle about in glittering formation. Everyone in the church looks up in awe as I hover there between heaven and earth, and some people fall on their knees and stretch out their arms towards me. ‘That boy from the city, the one who’s staying with Wabe Visser – he isn’t just an ordinary boy, he is someone special in God’s eyes.’ The singing becomes louder and louder and I call down to them that they have no need to be afraid, that everything will turn out for the best. Filled with impatience I await the day when all these things will come to pass. Sometimes I feel that it is near at hand, and there I’ll be, up on high. But something always intervenes. No doubt some arrangements still have to be made. And when the time comes I shall first of all do something for my parents, and for Jan. But also for Hait and Mem, and for the minister’s wife. And the minister. That’s quite a lot of people. I have only to ask and things will change, will get better. God will see to that.

We never saw our minister again after the funeral. For a while we were saddled with that clumsy interloper, and Sundays become an affliction. I made the journeys to Warns with bad grace and on the way back home I would tear to pieces everything that we had been assailed with from the pulpit, every last why and wherefore.

Then another minister came, a long-winded, boring old man. Religion lost all its appeal, and there was no longer any question of floating on high in the church.

A small black and white object is drifting in the waves under a cloudy, threatening sky. Sometimes I can see it clearly, occasionally disappearing until I spot it again a bit further away, bobbing up and down in the swell. Armed with a stick I crouch on the shingle and wait patiently for the tide to bring it in.

It is a kitten, its bulging belly floating on the water like a balloon, its limbs and head drooping down. I try to fish it towards me, thrashing about in the sea with my stick. It must be rescued from the cold water, it must be taken to safety, it must not be allowed to go on endlessly rolling about in the water. Finally it is in reach and I lay it down at the water’s edge, a crumpled coat, limp little paws and a grinning vacant face. I go to look for a piece of wood to carry it to the small beach on the other side of the harbour.

Just beneath the shingle I dig a hole in the wet sand and place the kitten there on a little bed of grass. Miserably wrinkled and creased, it lies on its side, a pitiful little toy. I pray as the minister might have done, using his words and intonations.

When the hole has been filled in again, I go back home to fetch a small paper flower Mem keeps in a drawer, and place it on the grave. On this spot, unknown to anybody, I can hold acts of worship. From here I can send up my prayers for my mother and for the minister’s wife. I can make offerings: pieces of broken pottery, a peeled-off ten-cent postage stamp, the lid of an old slate pencil box. If I am kind to the kitten, my prayers are sure to be heard. That’s the way it is. For a time, it absorbs my attention so much that even my memories of Jan and the afternoon on the Red Cliff become blurred.

Chapter 9

In the morning when I look out of the window with sleepy eyes I can see that the cloud cover is beginning to break up in the distance. For days the sky has been covered with low, dark clouds, like a lid on top of a pan. I had been feeling dejected and listless: the daily journey to school had suddenly seemed an insurmountable obstacle course to us, and the house, so crammed with people and their doings, had felt too small and threatening as if everything had been conspiring to drive me into a corner and curb my freedom.

‘Now we’ve had it,’ Mem had said, stamping her clogs in the stone yard, ‘winter is coming.’

The land lies chill and washed clean under a leaden weight, pools of rainwater sparkling in the grass and the cows moving through the sodden pasture on hooves black with mud.

When we were getting up, Hait had said to me, ‘Today we’re going to take a sheep to Stavoren, in the boat. It looks as if it’s going to be a fine day, so if you want to come along, just tell Mem. You can skip school just this once.’

Besides, it’s Saturday, and if I do go along I won’t be missing anything that matters. Saturday mornings at school seem to be nothing more than preparation for the doldrums of our Sunday rest.

I try to keep my balance as I walk up the wobbly gangplank to the boat where, tied to the rail, the sheep already lies meekly waiting, panting heavily.

It is still quiet in the harbour, a few fishermen are busying themselves with buckets and flat wooden crates, their voices echoing along the quay. A bucket of water, emptied beside a boat, has the tumultuous sound of a plunging waterfall. Though I have been on the boat several times, I have never gone out to sea in it. Either the boat had already left, or I would be missing school, ‘And your parents wouldn’t want that,’ Hait would say teasingly. There was always something to keep me on land. I didn’t really mind, except that Meint kept teasing me with, ‘Never been out? You’ve honestly never been out to sea? Ha, what sort of a man are you?’

All four of us sit down in the protective shell of the clog-shaped boat as, making little plopping sounds, it slips out of the harbour. The water behind us is split open into gently undulating lines that grow wider and fainter the further away they get. Hait is at the tiller, hunched up and looking unexpectedly small, while Popke and Meint are busily engaged with a tangle of ropes and canvas.

I look out from the little seat at the back and note how, all of a sudden, it is possible to take in the village with a single glance and how, faster and faster, first the small houses and then the quay wall, the workshed and then the pier, are being sucked away from us.

Once out at sea, the boat starts to pitch in the waves. My stomach chums. I grip the edge of the boat tight and feel the first splash of water, slap, in my face. The quay wall is far away by now, too far away…

When we swing around towards Stavoren, Popke and Meint hoist the sails. They look like large brown wings filled by unruly powers, time and again catching the wind with violent smacks. The boat lists suddenly and I topple over, to be caught by the sure arm of Hait who looks on calmly from the tiller as we draw a swirling curve of foam through the water.

Shrieking gulls dive behind us, emerging from the surf with fish in their beaks. The harbour has become a tiny doll’s harbour. Small and brown – a stripe, no more – the wooden sea wall follows us up the coast for a while. The large basalt blocks protruding from the water look like toy building blocks, paltry playthings scattered along the coast. The boat rears up more violently and the sea flings yet more waves of ice-cold water over us. I catch my breath and with chilled fingers cling convulsively to the edge. When Hait looks at me I smile back politely, a petrified smile. My boat trip is an excursion into a world of violence, of thrust and counter-thrust, a fight with chilly, flapping demons who are consigning us to the depths of the sea with explosive salvos of laughter. I look back with longing at the safe land.

Already, I think, I want to go back already… Never been out to sea, what sort of a man am I? Gasping for breath I try to talk unconcernedly to Hait, but he pushes me out of the rear seat with a firm hand. ‘Go and sit in the middle and hold on tight. And look out for that sail up there!’

He shouts the last few words, pushing me down forcefully at the same time. With a deafening clatter and the creaking of ropes the boom slams over our heads. The boat almost ships water. Meint, who is standing opposite me, is suddenly high above me, a moment later sinking steeply into the depths with a gigantic swoop. It is as if a pump in my stomach were squeezing the contents down with all its might. Don’t think about it, it is sure to pass, this is fun, this is an adventure… I mustn’t be sick, or they will laugh at me. But I struggle for air and feel the pressure under my throat grow stronger.

I cling to the dripping edge of the boat and work my way towards the middle. There I sink safely to the bottom, my back against the side, my feet against the crate in which the catch is stored. The sheep is falling from one side of the deck to the other, floundering about on blundering legs. Meint calls to me and laughs into the wind with forced heartiness. I admire him, he moves with quick agility across the slippery deck and his spirits are high. Gamely he staggers towards the sheep and ties the rope tighter and shorter. The sheep does not bleat, falling patiently backwards and forwards, but I can see the panic in its unseeing, staring eyes. I try to outshout my own fear and call something back. I can hear my voice bawling and sounding false. I laugh noisily and feel cowardly and insincere.

So this is what sailing is like, having a good time at sea and not being at school. My body is ice-cold and my fingers are numb. A strongly rising wave of nausea and the realisation that I am powerless to do anything to stop it makes my jaws begin to chatter uncontrollably. Desperately, I clench my teeth. Don’t vomit, not now…

And we used to sing about sailing at school, ‘Sailor, sailor, we’ll go with thee-ee, out to sea-ea, out to sea…’

Popke kneels down beside me and points to the shore. With effort, reluctantly, I get up on my haunches and see something on the shoreline that looks like a small hill. I give him a questioning look. ‘The Red Cliff,’ Popke shouts in my ear, ‘don’t you recognise it?’ Another wave of water sweeps over me, making me duck. Was that miserable, paltry little hillock the Cliff where Jan and I played? Was that the happy, warm, green hill that you could see rising so majestically above the land from our house? The sails again catch the wind with the sharp crack of a detonation.

Meint comes leaping towards me and leans overboard by my side, staring into the water. Hait, too, bends over, looks, cuts down the engine, and beckons to me. I hear a weird scraping and scouring noise, as if an animal were scrabbling and gnawing at the bottom of the boat. We are making almost no headway, but are pitching crazily up and down. The engine sends up impotent little puffs of smoke that make me feel sick, filling my nose and throat with a bitter taste. The thudding under the boat grows more insistent. When I get up and lean overboard my knees feel limp and weak.

Right next to me I can make out two gigantic rubber shapes sticking up out of the waves like ghostly apparitions. I can touch them if I put my hand out. ‘The aeroplane,’ Meint shouts excitedly into the wind, ‘can you feel it, we’ve sailed right on top of it!’

He slaps the heavy rubber tyres with a smacking noise, once, twice, and then he can’t reach them any longer. Eyes open wide, I stare at the terrifying objects, phantoms from another, mysterious, world. Beneath me there are men hanging upside down. I feel I know them, that they are familiar beings, drowned friends. So close by, surrounded by fish and seaweed, hanging, swaying, in filmy, heaving veils of water. Their arms move forwards, reaching out, beckoning: a swirling dance of death.

A moment later the contents of my stomach gush out into the waves, in a broad, yellowish stream.

When we reach Stavoren Hait says sympathetically that I needn’t go back in the boat if I don’t want to: I can walk back, it isn’t all that far to Laaxum. But an hour later, with timorous resignation, I allow myself to be hauled back on board, go and lie down in a corner under some sails and hope for the best. Think of it: anything could have happened on the walk back. I could have lost my way, or something else might have gone wrong, then I could have said goodbye to my new home as well.

In Stavoren I had immediately spotted the three German soldiers. They were standing about in the middle of the quay, and though they didn’t stop anyone their look was alert and keen, as if they were trying to see through your clothes. Their presence brought Amsterdam and the war startlingly closer again. The grim threat of shining boots, drab green uniforms and voices that sounded cold and hard was something I had almost forgotten here in Friesland, but suddenly it all came back again, that haunted feeling of suspicion and fear and of things that had to be done on the quiet, unseen.

I had made myself as inconspicuous as possible at the harbour, and had in no way betrayed the fact that I was seasick. If the Jerries had noticed that I was no fisherman but a boy from Amsterdam, they might have picked me up straight away. I had the feeling that they had been waiting for me there in the harbour. Maybe they had found my registration card and knew my name and number and had been looking for me all this time…

The return trip passed amazingly quickly. I lay dozing under the canvas, half sick, being tossed about in an unresisting heap. Before I knew it, the wind dropped, a benign calm descended over the boat and all the tightness ebbed out of my stomach. The sound of the engine grew faint and the sails came rustling down. I crept out from under the canvas and felt the warm air caress my face. Close by, craggy and familiar, lay the quay wall. I stepped onto it – the hero returned from his first sea voyage – and felt the ground sway under my feet: the land, too, seemed to have turned to water. No doubt that’s what they call ‘sealegs’.

A fisherman came striding along, his clogs sounding hollow on the stone path: it was music, dear, familiar music!

Back to Mem now, back quickly to the house standing firm and foursquare in the meadow, to sit down once more at a table that does not move!

An hour later I am sitting in front of the house, a late, fading sun casting pale patches of light across the fields. I have a hymn book on my lap and am trying to learn a psalm by heart for Sunday school tomorrow.

All the time I have been here, all these weeks and months, all these Saturday evenings, I have hit on no better way of getting these incomprehensible passages into my head than reading the stupid verses methodically over and over again until they stick in my memory.

…My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken thou me according to thy word. I have declared my ways, and thou heardest me: teach me thy statutes. Make me to understand the way of thy precepts…

Far away, almost directly opposite our house, hidden among clumps of trees, I can make out the roof of the farmhouse where Jan lives. In my mind’s eye I see the spacious, empty farmyard, now muddy and rain-washed, the tall stable doors, the living room with the kicked-off clogs outside the door. Jan is there, my saviour, the friend with whom I am going to escape. Does he sometimes look over this way as well, does he ever think of me?

I have already worked out the plan: one Sunday afternoon I’ll skip church and go and meet Jan by the harbour. I’ll have been able to take some food from home because they’ll all be at the service. We’ll make good our escape, and we’ll have a headstart of several hours before they start to miss us. Jan said we could sail across in a boat, but I’ll talk him out of that idea. I’ll never go out to sea again. Much better to make for the big dam, once we’re over that…

‘…You have declared my ways…’

Wrong.

‘…I have declared your ways…’

Wrong again.

‘…I have declared my ways, and thou teachest me…’

Dammit.

White rage wells up inside me, I’d like to smash the book against the wall or tear the barbed wire on the fence apart with my bare hands. Stinking, putrid life…

All the unfairness, all the uncertainty, all my sickness and fear, all the incomprehensible and unbearable longings, everything I yearn for that is unfulfilled… Lousy, stinking mess.

‘…My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken thou me…’

Jan, if only you were here, pushing my arms into the grass again or putting your hands around my throat; anything is better than this, this nothingness, this emptiness, this hopelessness.

‘…And thou heardest me: teach me thy statutes. Make me to understand the way of thy precepts.’

Chapter 10

Three days ago it happened to me for the first time. In bed at night, the only place and moment in the day when I can think about home, quietly and undisturbed, I turn to the wall and draw lines from me to Amsterdam, channels of communication between them and me. But the last few nights I have been thinking of Jan all the time. I try to push him away, but he stubbornly forces himself upon me, manipulating my thoughts like a tyrant, whether I want it or not. What bothers me most is that I do want it, that I am happy to give in to my fantasies. I touch my body, with shame and caution, as if someone were watching me.

This is me, this is my chest, my belly, these are my legs and the warmth I give off is mine. And the small, unseasoned twiglet that grows and stands up under my touch, the thing that seems anchored in my insides by deep roots, is that mine as well, do I have any influence over that swelling and that shuddering bulge?

I allow it to happen again and again, I examine it time after time. When I start out of my sleep at night, it is looming up ominously at the back of my vague dreams: I have it, too, and it is bad, it is a sin.

A dark, rainy afternoon. I had felt completely superfluous in the little house, imprisoned, caught in a trap. There had been no post for weeks, a fact that had burned a hole of uncertainty inside me. And though Hait had explained that the post in Holland was no longer working because everything had been closed down on account of the war, I had secretly kept looking put of the window every morning to see if anyone was bicycling up from Warns to bring us our post.

It was also pointless for me to write to Amsterdam, Mem had said, because no letters were arriving there either, a waste of paper and stamps. But I kept writing all the same, secretly.

I would take the envelopes from the small chest of drawers but I had no money to buy stamps. So I would drop the letters in the post box without stamps, having written the address in big fat writing across the envelope, on both sides, hoping that might help. Or else that my prayer might help, the one I uttered as the letter disappeared from my fingers into the dark slot: God, make them get it, please. If only You wish it, Thy will be done.

For a long time I obstinately stuck to the ritual of writing, putting letters in the box, and waiting hopefully for a reply.

That rainy afternoon I was convinced that a letter would be coming from Amsterdam: on the way to school I had seen three herons standing by the ditch, and that meant good luck, and the Bible passages we were told to read in class seemed to contain a hidden message too: despair not, salvation is nigh! In the village a farmer’s boy whistled a tune that resembled a song my mother always sang, I had recognised it with a start. That too was a hint, a sign meant for me alone.

But there was no letter. I searched everywhere in the room for that small white rectangle that had to be waiting for me on the chest of drawers, or on the mantelpiece. There was none, and I was too scared to ask Mem.

But something simply had to come. I couldn’t be left waiting and hoping and guessing like this for ever, surely they must realise at home that I was pining for some sign of life? What were they up to, then? Suddenly I rushed out of the house, telling Mem that I had forgotten something, that I had to go back to school.

On the road to Warns I turned off to the left and took the muddy side-road to Scharl, to Jan. The farmsteads looked gloomy in the bleak landscape, there were still a few lone sheep, but most of the stock had been taken from the meadows to spend the winter months in warm stables. All activity seemed reduced to the wind bending the trees and a wet dog yelping piercingly to be let in. I walked hurriedly, my eyes fixed on the path. I did nothing to avoid the pools of mud, but waded grimly through them, stamping my clogs into the water with wild delight and feeling the mud splash up my legs.

They had simply forgotten me, that’s what it was, that’s why there were no letters, they were glad to be rid of me. Now they could have a good time alone with my little brother, that was what they had wanted all along of course. I drowned the idea that something terrible, something irrevocable, might have happened to them under a wave of self-pity and baseless reproaches. But deep down I knew how unreasonable I was being and that there was nothing anybody could do about it: not my parents, not the people in Laaxum, not anybody. It was just the Jerries and the lousy war. But I was stuck with it, and that was that.

A farm labourer hurried across the road, squelching through yellow-brown puddles of manure, his boots sucked firmly down into the sludgy morass. ‘Weather’s a right shit!’ he shouted in my direction. ‘Not fit for dogs! Why don’t you get out of the rain?’

The land and the farmyards seemed to have turned into a swampy quagmire in a matter of days. I could feel rain-water seeping into my clogs and running down my face. I would it lick away, together with the snot from my nose. I was drowning in the dismal melancholy that came dripping out of the sky, drenching everything and everybody.

The family with whom Jan lived were busy in the stables, dragging buckets and noisy milk churns about. A small oil lamp was burning on the wall, and a little greyish light came through a low, arched window. The farmer himself was half-hidden under a cow, his cheek pressed against her loins as he grabbed at the pale pink udders, monstrously bloated with veins fatly swollen as if they were about to burst. I looked at his hands squeezing the cow’s dangling teats roughly and uncaringly. A white jet shot through his pumping fingers and frothed into the bucket.

‘Have you come to see Jan?’ The woman was suddenly standing behind me and I turned round, as if caught in the act. ‘He’s inside. Go and look in the house.’

The house lay to one side of the stables. I walked through a garden where red cabbage and leeks stood among a tangle of plants gone to seed. I spotted Jan through one of the windows. He was sitting at a table with his back towards me, his legs stretched out on a chair. I put my hand against the glass and peered inside. I was spying on a completely different way of life, one in which everything seemed matter-of-fact and calm, where a boy could stare into the fire glowing peacefully in the stove. I wondered if he was asleep.

Oh Jan, mysterious, strong Jan whom I wanted to see so desperately, for whom I longed. There he sat so close to me, almost within reach, but even now, a yard away from me, he seemed unattainable, many lives removed from me. Did I have the right to bother him with my tearful despair? Could I disturb his private, dark tranquillity?

I wanted to turn round and make off before I was seen. The window-pane rattled when I withdrew my hand and the boy in the room turned his head in surprise, squinting in my direction. I raised my hand and pulled a face. To my relief, I saw Jan’s face light up in a pleased smile.

The room swam in black shadows, the furniture floating on a deathly still, dark sea. In a corner an oil lamp made spluttering noises and from the stable adjoining the room came the subdued lowing of a cow, tormented and in pain. Occasionally there was a clanking like heavy chains being beaten together, and it seemed that Jan, motionless, was listening out for that sound.

Feeling my way with my feet I stepped into the dark room and moved towards the chair. ‘Don’t you have to work today? I thought you always helped?’

‘No, I’m not allowed to do anything for a few days.’ When Jan got up from the table I could see that he had a bad limp. His face was pale and his reddened eyes, strained and weary, had a troubled expression. His initial pleasure at seeing me seemed to have vanished. He made his way awkwardly across the room, overturned a cup on the windowsill with a clatter and looked out of the dark window.

I had wanted to look the place over, to see how he lived, what sort of things were part of his daily life, but I was afraid to. As if rooted to the spot I remained standing in the middle of the room and kept my eyes timidly on the sullen figure by the window.

‘Come on, let’s go upstairs, I’ll show you my den. Or would you rather stay here?’ He opened a door at the back and walked in front of me up a steep little flight of wooden stairs. The stable sounds were very close now through the plank wall and there was a sweetish scent of hay. Excitedly, I followed him up the blue-painted stairs. I was being admitted to the room in which my hero slept, where he dreamed, a world of mysterious deeds I had only been able to guess at in my imagination. It was sure to be a place of unlimited promise, of friendship, shared secrets, of silent touches and discreet meaningful glances.

The little room was small, more a partitioned corner of the attic, with almost the same dimensions as my cupboard-bed. Even so, I thought, it’s his own room. Here he can read, lie on his bed, here he can be alone. He doesn’t have to share anything with anybody.

Jan pointed to a small window which did not look outside but gave onto the hayloft. You could see the haystack, dug into on one side, and beyond it a corner of the pigsty. A heavy wooden beam ran in front of the window, covered with thick layers of grey cobwebs to which dark pieces of dead insects were attached, and the planks beyond were covered with a grotesque layer of bird shit.

‘Shall I show you what I’ve done?’ Jan tried to pull up a leg of his overalls but the material caught in a lump around his knee. Annoyed, he sat down on his bed and began to undo the top of his overalls, his finger tugging impatiently at the buttons.

This little room is like a nest in a tree, I thought, suspended between dark branches and protected by cobwebs. Even I bough you couldn’t look out you could feel it was getting late, you could hear the darkness closing in on us, caressing our limbs. In the gloom of the room I could see a pale torso emerging one shoulder at a time from out of the overalls and hanging there luminously, fragile and tender.

I felt myself grow hot with excitement: this was a hidden place that no one knew about. What was about to happen here was something I would discuss with no one else, a silent, wordless happening between Jan and me. I had the feeling that I was about to discover the real Jan, that he would strip off the layers of indifference before my very eyes, revealing at long last who he really was. I heard him get to his feet and saw him push the overalls down. What was he really up to, what did he mean to do? Was he going to do again what he had done at the Cliff, the bare belly and the sticking-up thing?

‘Come here, take a look at that. Closer.’ The pale shadow sank back onto the bed, the voice sounding hesitant, almost embarrassed.

I went up to him, my heart beginning to thump rapidly and chaotically, the blood throbbing violently against my throat. ‘I can’t see anything, it’s much too dark.’ I could hear how toneless and laboured my voice sounded. Jan stood up, his feet creaked across the floor. I peered at the movements of his white arms and suddenly a softly surging light flared up, casting a path in the darkness. ‘Bother it.’ The match went out. More creaking sounds and a moment later an oil lamp flickered.

From the dark Jan pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. ‘Look,’ he pointed to his leg, ‘look at that cut.’ I saw a gash, a dark line running almost all the way from his knee to the top of his leg. ‘My knife slipped. Really stupid.’ He gave a muffled chuckle. ‘And it’s deep, too. I ought to be sitting with my leg up all the time.’

I crouched on the floor beside Jan and looked at the elongated, scabby wound and at the smooth, clean line of the legs in the knitted underwear that flopped loosely about his body. Jan sat bent forward, peering closely at the wound as if he were short-sighted. His fingers pushed and pressed along the dark stripe. Suddenly he placed his hand over it protectively, as if he were afraid that I might hurt him. ‘It’s red-hot, just like I’m boiling. It’s full of pus which has to come out. Have a feel, see how much it’s throbbing.’

I didn’t move. The wound was like a thin snake that might suddenly wriggle away at great speed.

‘Would you mind squeezing it out for me? Otherwise I’ll have to go to the doctor’s.’ He looked at me anxiously, I had never seen him so uncertain and afraid before. ‘Just have a go, I don’t care if it hurts.’ I edged a little closer and laid my hand warily on the white leg. I could feel the throb of the feverish skin under my awkward fingertips. I was unable to talk, to breathe, to swallow, frightened to death lest I made the wrong move and caused him pain.

‘Get on with it, then.’

Carefully I slid my hand across a soft, smooth surface until it came up against the crusty, rough, injury. ‘Ouch, careful.’ The leg moved and pushed into my chest. ‘Watch it, you hear?’ He pointed to a whitish little swelling at the edge of the scab. ‘Feel that? The pus is under there, that’s where you have to squeeze.’ He pushed one of his hands under his thigh so that I could have a better look.

A wild sensation shot up inside me, something I could not control, like a flame spreading with lightning speed. I wanted to press my face between those two white legs, push my hands up inside the loose underwear so that I could feel his body, breathe upon it, exorcise it. I wanted to absorb it, greedily and hungrily, to kiss it and caress it.

Dizzy with fear I gripped his knee tightly and bent my head, my tongue moving spasmodically in a dry mouth. My body was jerky and stiff. Horror-struck I felt it happen: like an insect breaking out of its tight cocoon with strange, compulsive thrusts and then freeing its wings. Something had burst within me. I stood up awkwardly and shifted my clothes, in a panic lest Jan noticed.

It roared inside me: I had it, too, I was having it too, just like [an. It was like a sickness you could hide from nobody. Everyone could see it and would talk about it. I was betrayed, lost.

I pinched the skin on Jan’s leg between my fingers, that mouse-soft, butterfly-wing, tender warm skin. I kept pinching wildly and despairingly until I heard Jan say ‘Ow’, and tell me to squeeze with my fingers closer together.

I felt the wound break open as you might feel a gooseberry pop under your shoe with a sudden snap. Jan bent forward with his eyes screwed half-shut and wiped the wound with the sleeve of his overalls. I straightened up in the little room .and tried to control my panting. ‘Bloody hell,’ I heard Jan say, ‘that hurt all right.’

I was already by the stairs, the doorknob in my hand. I have to go.’ A moment later I had stumbled outside through the dark living-room, and was tearing home without stopping, to a house full of busy, warm and familiar people.

Chapter 11

The days crawl by on hand and knees, drab and without prospect. Bewildered I sometimes look at the calendar and see how many days have gone by. Those mysterious rows of figures only make me despondent; one long day compressed into one little number, and there have been so many little numbers, and there are so many freshly mustered columns still waiting, drawn up in serried ranks.

I feel locked up in time. It’s been more than five months, too long to remember my home properly – sometimes I think with a shock, What did they really look like? How did Mummy laugh? – and too brief to feel properly at home in my new surroundings. I wander about in an illusive no-man’s-land, a kaleidoscope of chill, fluctuating forms. Sometimes the little figures jell and I can make out my mother’s face, but they fall apart at the slightest movement, shockingly, into everyday, tangible objects.

Who can say how much longer the war will go on – for months, for years or perhaps for the rest of my life, so that I shall never see my parents again, my friends, our street. Everything is too confused for me even to cry about, I just take things as they come, day after day, week after week.

‘Be a brave boy, now my father had said to me that time when we packed my case. I had been kneeling to one side, looking on enthralled at the way all the bits and pieces for my journey were being fitted together: face-cloth, towel, a set of underwear, toothbrush, my last pair of scuffed shoes, the pyjamas Mummy had patched together from a discarded pair of my father’s…

‘Be a big boy, then you’ll please your Mummy a very great deal.’ My father had lifted my face by the chin and smoothed my hair. A big boy? I had certainly grown taller and sturdier. Mem sometimes seized me between her strong hands and Have me a satisfied squeeze. ‘Soon they won’t believe their eyes, your father and mother! They’ll hardly recognise you any more!’

I had acknowledged her approval with a feeble smile. Soon? I thought. How soon? I certainly have grown, she is quite right there. I can’t get into most of the clothes I brought with me from Amsterdam, and instead have to wear Meint’s tilings quite a lot of the time, while he wears Popke’s castoffs. But really big? I still cry a lot, when no one is looking, and I "Hon think of home, and of my mother. Mother’s darling, they always used to call me at school.

Sometimes I look over my old clothes, so many folded away memories. All stored away in the suitcase: the check shirts, the blue linen shorts, the plus fours ‘for best’ (‘Oh, no, you can’t possibly walk about in those here,’ Mem had laughed uproariously, and I had never worn them once), and the woollen cable-stitch sweater that my mother had made herself, just like the shirts.

‘Had made herself.’ I take the folded garments carefully in my hands and feel how smooth, how fine they are. I sniff at them because in the early days the smell used to take me straight back to the bedroom at home, to the wardrobe where our clothes used to hang and to the sweetish scent of Mummy’s slip and stockings. But even the smell of my clothes has faded or changed. Or can it be that I have forgotten what it smelled like at home?

The lorry near the Royal Palace, the nocturnal drive over the big dam, and above all the bicycle ride with my father through the deserted Rozengracht – all have been etched into my memory and are at the same time irretrievably dim and far away. Wiped out, it would seem, the way the master with a peremptory gesture passes a cloth over my slate at school: ‘That sum is wrong. Do it again.’ I have accepted the loss, I have never been brave enough to protest. All I have done is mourn.

I have buckled down, I have conformed. On Sundays I go to church twice, on Saturdays I learn the psalm for Sunday school and on Sundays the Bible text for school on Monday. Early in the morning I help Jantsje and Meint clean the sheep droppings from the meadow, I churn milk in bottles into butter, listen outwardly unmoved to the praying at school, help Hait sometimes to mend his nets and trudge about in clogs like a real country boy.

In short, I have become one of them, outwardly that is, because when no one is looking, when I feel I am not being watched, I often sit at the far end of the stone seawall and look out over the capricious sea, the driving, moving masses of rebellious grey. Then I hope that, some bright day, I might suddenly be able to see over to the other side, there, far away, on that clear, sharp line between sea and sky. Let all go well with them, dear God, I pray, please keep them alive. Make them think of me and please let them come soon, to take me away from here.

The winter months are overwhelmingly bleak, and we spend most of the time inside the small house. We are like animals in our lair, crowded together and taking shelter in the warmth.

A razor-sharp wind blows straight across the bare land and the stripped dykes. Rain lashes the hedges and ditches, snow piles up in spotless layers – it all forces us to live a futile, cramped existence. When we step shivering outside in the mornings the grass is like a crackling sheet underfoot and every step taken sends silvery needles of ice splintering apart with delicate little sounds. Winter crickets. Faces around steaming pans of food, climbing early to bed and the smoke of the blown-out oil lamp: Mem, regularly the last, sighing as she gets undressed.

Sometimes I blow a hole in the ice of the frozen window-pane and stare across the white fields to the dark smudge which I know is where Jan lives. In the spring we shall roll down the Cliff again, our bodies close and warm together. And then I shall ask him straight out – something I have wanted to ask him hundreds of times, rehearsed in every combination of phrase and tone, but never allowed to cross my lips – if I may see his belly again, if the two of us may get undressed together. He will pull down his trousers and I will be able to touch and hold him there. I feel a compulsive and inescapable longing to lay my head against his body and look at that stiff, painful swelling.

How strange, I think, I’ve become like an animal, like one of I he cows here, or the sheep. Licking, sucking, biting, wolfing my food down, a ravenous, greedy beast. It doesn’t surprise me, and I am no longer upset by it either. Aloof and lonely, hidden away in my bolt hole, I am becoming more aware of myself.

And so the winter crawls by, on hands and knees.