Girl in Hyacinth Blue (5 page)

Hannah lingered doing the errands, not want ing to go right home. In the grocers' shops there were queues all the way out to the streets even though less was displayed than last week. After four shops, she stepped out into the boulevard again.

Then she saw them.

Another family of yellow stars carrying suitcases was being herded down the middle of Schelde straat.

To Westerbork. That place.

Why them? she wondered.

As they passed, for the flash of a second a little boy looked at her with frightened eyes. She dipped her head and walked on. A pain shot through her chest. Ignoring it seemed the same kind of betrayal as Marie's. She turned onto Rijnstraat and hurried home so fast she had a side ache.

She accidentally let the door slam when she came in. "No parsley, so I got celery, but no egg anywhere."

"No egg? Did you go to Ivansteen's?" Mother asked.

"And to three places on Scheldestraat."

"What'll we do? And those poor homeless refugees coming and not even a full Seder plate."

"It won't matter. In a matter of time, it won't matter at all."

"Hannah! Never say that. Don't let me ever hear you say that."

"What happened?" Hilde took the shank bone from her hands to examine it. "What happened out there on the street?"

Hannah slapped the celery onto the sink counter and turned to leave. "Nothing, Oma."

Hilde followed her. "What did you see out there?"

"Nothing. Just children jumping off porches holding open umbrellas. Playing parachutes. They do it whenever they hear planes. Haven't you no ticed?"

She watched Hilde and Mother look at each other in puzzlement. No, of course they hadn't.

That evening with the house darkened, after her parents hid ten pieces of hametz around the house, Tobias did the ritual final search for hametz by can dlelight. Using a feather, he brushed the crumbs into a wooden spoon with a seriousness Hannah couldn't remember from past years when it was more of a game.

"Where'd you get the feather, Toby?" Hannah asked.

"It's Leo's." He held it up and twirled it. "Look how it's purple on the edge. And wider on one side than the other. It came out in my hand as I was holding him. I didn't mean to."

No. He could never do the birds harm.

Father put the crumbs, the feather and the spoon into a paper bag to be burned the next morning. After Toby went to bed, when she thought he'd be asleep, she drew back the curtain that divided their bedroom and looked at him awhile. The boy in the street had the same curly hair as Toby. Bending to pull the blanket over him, she breathed the musty, innocent smell of rabbit and crayon and pigeon.

Before breakfast the whole family gathered on the porch, and Father struck a match and touched it to the edge of the bag.

"Two places, Sol," Hilde said. "To give it a good burning."

Hannah watched the black edge creep sideways across the bag, like the front line of an army, she thought, bringing a small wall of orange flame be hind it until it touched the other black edge ad vancing to meet it. The Red Sea closing in instead of parting. Eventually the wooden spoon was a burnt bone of dying cinder on the bricks of the porch. Hannah stamped it out.

In the afternoon Father went walking with Toby, Hannah didn't know where, but she knew they'd end up at the Rotterdam Cafe in order to bring home for Seder dinner two of the refugee families who were living upstairs.

Except for the slow rhythmic crunch-crunch of Mother chopping nuts for the charoseth, and the coos of the pigeons echoing down the open air vent, the house was quiet. With everything nearly ready for the holiday at sundown, it seemed to Hannah that the rooms breathed expectation, as before a death, or a birth. She thought about that for a while, feeling it settle as she sat sideways in her father's chair at the dining table, fingering idly the scalloped edge of the white tablecloth.

Hilde wedged two candles in the silver candle sticks, arranged the Delftware basin and pitcher on the sideboard for washing the hands, dug a dust rag one last time into the sideboard carving and flicked it along the lower edge of the picture frame.

"You know what she's looking at out the win dow, don't you?" Hilde said. "Her future hus band."

Naturally she'd think that, Hannah said to her self.

"What do you think?" Mother asked from the kitchen doorway.

"Pigeons. Just pigeons," Hannah said.

"Pigeons? What do you mean by that?" Hilde said.

"I mean it doesn't matter what she's looking at. Or what she's doing, or not doing." She looked Hilde dead in the eye. "It only matters that she's thinking."

"Is that why you like her?" Mother asked in sur prise.

"And because I know her."

Hannah stood up, went down the hallway and up the attic ladder. Leo was closest, dozing. She grabbed him first, and in a frenzied flapping of wings, twisted his neck until its tightness released under her fingers. Squawks of the others rang in her ears. She lunged to catch Henriette and skinned her knee. Two, three, four, each time that same soft popping underneath the feathers.

She came down the hallway staring straight ahead. Her hands trembled so much Mother no ticed. Hannah looked down too and saw a wisp of feather underneath the nail of her forefinger, the smallest bit of gray breast down. She flicked it away. Mother and Hilde gaped at her, apparently unable to move. Hilde's lips pinched into a purple wound.

"Go wash your hands," Mother murmured.

Hannah turned, caught her foot on the hall runner, and lunged into the bathroom. She heard her mother's voice. "This is one time, in your son's home, you will say nothing, Hilde. Nothing." Hannah turned on the water. She didn't want to hear what would come next. She washed up to her elbows, and her skinned knee. After a while she slipped into her room and lay on her bed. When she heard through the air vent Mother sweeping the coop, she felt a trickle of moisture creep toward her temple. She waited for the chop-chop of the charoseth. Then she changed her dress and gave her hair a good brushing.

When Father and Toby came in, she couldn't look directly at them. The two German families were awkward, not knowing where to put them selves. A boy younger than Toby stood wordless and clinging to his father. Mother had Toby intro duce each guest to Hilde, had him pass out the Haggadahs, had him bring the white kittel to his father to put on. She had him arrange on the Seder plate the celery, the shank bone, the charoseth, a withered root of horseradish and a small peeled potato carved narrower at one end to look like an egg, and then she asked him to watch on the porch for sunset in the western sky. All this, Hannah knew, so he wouldn't think to take the little German boy upstairs to show him the birds.

Mother rummaged in the sideboard and brought out the old Delftware candlesticks. "Here," she said to Hannah. "These were your great-grandmother Etty's, but tonight and forever, they'll be yours. Wash them and put them on the table."

And Hannah did.

"Sunset's coming," Toby announced from the porch. "The sky's all goldy."

Her mother struck a match and held it to an old candle stub until a flame rose, touched it to the two tapers in the silver candlesticks and handed it to Hannah. She did the same with hers. Watching her candlelight illuminate the girl in the painting, she knew why this night was different from all other nights. Real living had begun.

Adagia

Walking with his wife Digna along the narrow canal, Laurens van Luyken kept a discreet distance behind the young lovers, as if to give them privacy, but he watched their every move. Just be yond his neighbor's oxcart, he saw his daughter lean, unnecessarily, on the young man's arm.

The autumn air blew crisply and Digna drew close her cape. Laurens usually found wind invigor ating, but this afternoon it made him feel as though a wall of gray sea were thundering toward him against which he had to brace himself. The breeze was crisp, the fallen leaves were crisp, everything was crisp. Johanna's voice was crisp earlier that day when she told him, "Papa, Fritz asked me to marry him, and I told him yes." Just like that. No prel ude. No delicacy. Not even a nod to tradition. As if fathers needn't even be asked anymore to give up their daughters to someone else's love. Was this the way Amsterdammers did things? A herald of how life would be in the new century?

"We should give them a fine gift," Digna said, taking Laurens's arm just like Johanna had done with Fritz. "Something of ours she's always loved and will always keep."

"Does that mean you're agreeing to this?"

"He's a good fellow. And handsome." He caught her playful smile. "Erasmus says if you must be hanged let it be on a fair gallows."

"Gallows weren't intended for the young and innocent."

Up ahead their dog, Dirk, trotted right in Jo hanna's way so that she almost stumbled, and then Fritz said something that made her laugh. Laurens watched her press herself against this man and kiss him lightly on his ear. Dirk barked what Laurens knew was an admonition. Laurens found a perverse pleasure in noting that Dirk did not take too keenly to the attentions Johanna was paying to this odd smelling interloper in leather shoes instead of good, solid klompen, clearly not a resident of Vreeland. He was amused when Dirk, trembling with suspi cion, had growled something obviously insulting at Fritz when he arrived by coach at noon.

"Look at her, Laurens. Radiant."

Instead, he glanced sideways at his wife. The happiness had traveled: His daughter's wild, dewy bliss had freshened every pore in Digna's familiar face.

"What could we give them?" she asked, a pleas ant urgency in her voice.

"A broom and a butter churn?"

"We could give them the Digna Louise."

"No. Fritz has an old smack boat. He told me he took it out last week to the Zuider Zee and nearly froze. No one in his right mind, outside fish ermen, would go sailing there after September."

Their neighbors' skiffs were lined up stem to stern where the canal joined Loodrechtsche Plassen. Laurens remembered how as a young girl Johanna called them wishbone boats, for the graceful shape of their prows. He wondered if she told Fritz that just now as they passed the skiffs along the bank.

Johanna and Fritz turned at Ruyter's mustard mill to walk the lakeshore wagon road, and looked back for Laurens and Digna to follow. Something of their expectancy, the feeling that they were sail ing forth into an adventure in an untried craft, awakened in Laurens a vaguely competitive warmth, and he slipped his arm around his wife's supple waist. "You cold?" he asked, half hoping that she was.

"I could give her my mother's opal ring, but that's not very much. And it should be something from both of us. For both of them."

To Laurens, everything about the couple ahead bore the conspicuous marks of euphoria. Too soon blooming, he thought, too soon coming in to seed. They had not suffered long winter evenings of soulful contemplation, but were careening ahead as if it were already tulip time.

So now she would go. She would leave Vree land where she knew every pathway, every plank of every bridge, every family's horse and wagon, where he'd taught her to skate right here on Lood rechtse Plassen, where he'd watched her play every summer under the willows at their canal edge, hap pily pouring buckets of canal water into a cracked and chipped Delftware tea set that had been his mother's. She would leave the town of her birth and ancestry, and go to Amsterdam, nearly half a day's carriage ride over the dike roads.

Laurens was amused that Dirk made such a show of his distrust of this wolf in sheep's clothing, this mountebank with the queer smell, by plunging his way between Fritz and Johanna's legs, but Laurens did not gloat. Something moved him about the way they paid homage to each other with their eyes, Jo hanna shining with the intoxication of the unknown, and he wanted them to have a moment's peace. Only a thrown stick, well aimed along the narrow bank, would tear Dirk away from his self-appointed office of protecting Johanna. Laurens called to Dirk, threw the stick and missed the grassy bank. Dirk bounded into the lake to chase the splash, and Digna laughed, making it all worthwhile.

She squeezed his arm. "I know! The painting. Girl With a Sewing Basket." Her bright expectant eyes and open-mouthed smile shot through him. "She's always loved it."

"No."

Dirk brought him the stick but he did not take it.

Digna turned to him, a look of bafflement on her sweet ivory face. He watched a breeze blow strands of her chestnut hair out from her chignon, waving like sea grass in a current. She pulled him along, laughing through her words. "What makes you so ungenerous? She's our only daughter."

"I'm sure we can think of something else."

"Why not the painting?"

"Because I gave it to you."

"But it would be a touch of our home in theirs."

"No, Digna."

"Why not?" She put her hand in his, urging his agreement.

"I wouldn't want to be without it."

"I never knew you were that attached to it. It isn't worth much, though I do like the way it mimics a Vermeer."

He grabbed on to that. "More like a de Hooch. The dealer said de Hooch painted floor tiles the same way."

She smiled a teasing reprimand, a smile recog nizing the transparency of his diversion. He felt foolish and exposed. She knew him too well. No doubt she had some adage from Erasmus to warn about people who try lamely to change the subject. Digna rendered favorite epigrams from Erasmus's Adagia as embroidery samplers, sometimes keeping the Latin if she liked the way it sounded, like "Tem pus omnia revelat." So earnest there by the fireside, over the years she stitched onto stretched cloth as if onto her heart Erasmus's religion of rational thought: Trying got the Greeks to Troy. An ill crow lays an ill egg. No one is injured save by himself.