My Enemy's Cradle (2 page)

The first Friday after I'd arrived in Holland, I'd stood in the center of the parlor as the sun went down, feeling lost without my stepmother lighting the candles to mark the beginning of the Sabbath. My aunt had noticed; she shook her head and then came over and held me tight. "No," she had whispered. Five years later, Friday evening was just another evening. I kept track of the holy days in my head, but I'd learned to sweep aside any feelings of guilt about not celebrating them. Any day now, I told myself, it will be safe again to go home. To become again who I used to be.

Poland was a very long time ago.

But Anneke should have known how devastating her choice of husband would be to me. Instead, she denied the other half of the issue as completely as she denied the Jewish half of me.

"He's a boatbuilder," she argued in the beginning when my aunt and I tried to persuade her not to see Karl. "He's not a Nazi. He was conscripted. He didn't have a choice."

No one else felt this way about the German soldiers. Anneke's friends sometimes bragged that they were going out with them and were going to get them drunk and push them into a canal, although I never heard of any dying that way. We all passed along jokes about the soldiers—ridiculing them made the Occupation more bearable. And everyone did their part to foil the Nazis when they could: switching road signs, pretending not to understand German when asked for directions, or painting
OZP
—Orange Will Conquer—wherever we could in our forbidden national color.

Anneke was different though. I should have seen right away how she was with this one. I should have stopped it.

Because I wouldn't have liked Karl any better if he had been a soldier in the Dutch army. I had met him only once, a week before. Anneke had arranged for us to meet at the bakery, when he picked her up, as though by accident, so I could get a look at him, see how handsome he was. And he was. Although the only way a man could be attractive to me was Isaak's way: dark, with serious, concerned eyes. Karl was fair and tall, and there was something closed about his face. When Anneke introduced us, his eyes slid past me. If he had been anxious to gaze at Anneke, I would have understood, would have liked him for that, but I remember instead he was scanning the shop, as if looking for an escape. I did not tell Anneke this.

"Well, his eyes," I told her instead, "the clear blue of them against the white, remind me of hyacinths blooming against a late snowfall." This pleased her and in fact it was true. But now I wished I had told her what I had sensed—what kind of man he was.

So much was wrong, but that first night all I could think of was that Anneke was leaving me. My throat was so swollen with all I wanted to say that I could say nothing at all. I turned out the light and rolled over to face away from her, but I couldn't sleep.

Around midnight, I needed to use the toilet. I crept out into the hall quietly, so as not to wake anyone, and as I passed my aunt and uncle's room I heard their voices.

"...if it means putting our family in danger," my uncle said.

"She
is
our family, Pieter," my aunt replied, angry with him.

"She's
your
family," my uncle corrected her. "Not
our
family,
yours.
"

In the morning, I watched Anneke as she got ready for work. I could tell by the care she took dressing that she was going to see Karl afterward.

"When will you tell your parents?" I asked from my bed.

"Well, I'll tell Mama tonight, I think." She chose a lipstick the color of ripe cherries and stained her mouth. "First I want to tell Karl."

I sat up. "
Anneke!
"

She laughed and flicked her fingers at me in the mirror in that way she always did—as if worries were merely little gnats she had to chase away. "He'll be happy; he wants a large family. He has a new niece he adores."

"But all the plans?"

"You're too serious,
katje
!" She hadn't called me Kitten for a long time. It was the name she'd given me when I had first arrived, when I was only fourteen and she was sixteen. She came over and sat beside me on the bed. "Give me your hand. I'll read your fortune."

I held out my hand and she kissed it, leaving a heart-shaped lipstick stain on my palm. "Look at that," she said. "That's a very good sign—it means you're going to fall in love soon. And you'll get married, too, and you'll live happily ever after and we'll both have ten children and they'll all have ten children and you and I are going to grow old together and always be happy."

I curled my fingers over the mark on my palm. "Are you sure about this, Anneke? Do you even love him?"

Anneke went back to her bureau and pulled her clips from her hair and combed out her waves before she answered. "I'm
in
love with him. I want to get married ... and there aren't as many men around, now that they're diving under. Have you noticed that?" She sighed and turned from the mirror. "He loves me. I want to get out of here. And now I'm pregnant. I think that's enough." She came over to me and sat on the bed. "Here, let me brush your hair. You ought to let me cut it before I go. No one wears it this way anymore, and you'd be so beautiful."

I would never be beautiful. Anneke and I shared the same features—our mothers' features—but fine breads and coarse loaves are made from the same ingredients. And I would never cut my hair; I wore it braided and pinned up, as my mother had. I let An-neke brush it out loose, and when she left, I didn't go downstairs right away. I folded her nightgown, placed it under her pillow, and put the cover back on her lipstick. I straightened the pictures she had cut from magazines and tucked along the mirror's frame: Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard. What would this room be like empty of her things? Empty of
her?

After my mother died, my father had paced through the house gathering up her things without looking at them, his face set in angry lines. Everything she had touched, packed in dark boxes. It had hurt him too much to see them. But it had hurt me more not to. I sank down on Anneke's bed, suddenly stung with tears.

Later that day, as I set the brushes and pail out on the front steps to scrub them, Mrs. Bakker called to me from her doorway.

"Have you heard the news? The Nuremberg Laws are to be implemented here."

"
Ja,
" I agreed carefully, pouring the water over the steps. I had heard, although I didn't think my uncle had said so exactly. I bent over the bricks and began to work.

"It will be very bad for Jews here, I think," she continued, and something in her voice made me wary. "For anyone with Jewish blood."

I forced my arms to continue scrubbing, but suddenly I didn't have enough air, and the sounds of the street spun together into a whine. I kept my head down, focusing on the pattern of blue and gray tiles that bordered the threshold, so she wouldn't see my reaction. Never since I'd arrived had anyone asked me about my father or my life in Poland. Never, as far as I knew, had my aunt or uncle explained why I had come, except to refer vaguely to my mother's death. It was a subject we didn't even discuss among ourselves.

"Well," said Mrs. Bakker, "take care of yourself, Cyrla." She closed her door.

I finished the steps as quickly as I could. Inside, my aunt was peeling pears—she had been stewing and canning fruit for weeks.

"I'll do the shopping now," I told her, taking the ration coupons from the shelf. I didn't wait for a reply; I grabbed my bicycle and set out.

But not to the market square.

I took the bicycle path along the Burgemeester Knappertlaan, which I usually avoided in favor of smaller streets that didn't border the canal. Despite the years I'd lived in the Netherlands, I'd never grown comfortable with so much water, waiting deep and black behind the hunched shoulders of the banks. Nearly a year and a half since the bombings in Rotterdam, I imagined I could still smell the smoke on the canals, and in fact they still carried cinders and chunks of rubble washing down from the seaport. I couldn't help but wonder how long bits of charred human flesh or bones floated in that sour brine also—nearly a thousand people died that day, burned in the hot oven of our ruined city—and so I took pains to stay away. Today the fog rose up from the water like cold breath, but I needed to see Isaak, and the route along the canal was the shortest to the Jewish Council.

A board nailed to the trunk of a willow caught my attention. I pulled over and read the words lettered on it.
Park—No Admittance to Jews.
Another sign was on the gate to the Promenade. I looked ahead; every clump of trees had apparently been declared a park:
No Admittance to Jews.
I began to pedal again and tried to see only the flaming scarlet and gold of the chrysanthemums that burned along the banks.

The Council was located in the first floor of a worn brick building, which had once housed a bank, a fish market, and an ice-cream parlor, all of which had closed after the yellow "J"s had been painted on their windows. I had been here many times before with Isaak as he picked up papers or stopped in to speak with someone. Always it had been a simple matter of walking through the doors. But this day was different. Two Gestapo leaned against the gate in their long green coats and black boots, smoking and looking bored. A third stood by the door nailing up a notice. The new restrictions. I stood behind him to read them.

He turned. "This is no business of yours."

I moved to pass into the building, but he blocked me. "Nothing here is any of your business."

"I'm looking for a friend."

"You should know better than to have friends inside here." By the way he looked at me, I could tell it amused him to think a Dutch girl would want to enter this place.

"I need to go inside," I tried again. "I want to find someone."

Now he wasn't so pleasant. "You should be more careful choosing your friends."

One of the other agents stubbed out his cigarette and raised his eyes to us.

I got back on my bicycle and rode the few blocks to the synagogue. Rabbi Geron was in his office; yes, Isaak had been called to a meeting in Delft the night before, he said, although, no, he didn't know when to expect him back. I asked him to take me to Isaak's room. If he was surprised, he didn't show it, and this thrilled me somehow, as if I had stolen an intimacy. I found myself smiling as we crossed the stone courtyard that separated the synagogue from the small outbuilding where Isaak lived.

Before the Occupation, this building had housed offices and storage rooms. Now, anyone who needed shelter could stay here. Isaak told me a lawyer had come, and a man who had lost his position as a professor and was now alone after sending his wife and daughter to relatives in America. The old man who cared for the grounds slept here as well, and a fifteen year-old boy, recently orphaned.

"Do you make a family for yourselves?" I had asked Isaak once. "The boy, is he a brother? Is the professor a father to you?" He had just looked at me, puzzled.

In all the time I'd known Isaak I'd never been inside. As in everything else, he kept what was most private to himself. But when Rabbi Geron opened the door to Isaak's room, I would have known it among a thousand as his.

A single cot in the corner was made neatly with a gray-and-blue–striped blanket. The goosenecked lamp beside his bed was the only curved line in the room. Books were everywhere, but in orderly stacks. Two prints of da Vinci drawings and half a dozen maps hung on the walls, all perfectly aligned.

A cracked white china mug on the desk held a stick of charcoal and three pencils. I lifted each one for the pleasure of touching something Isaak had touched. Beside the mug were two drawing pads. The smaller, I knew, was full of his bird drawings—he loved to draw birds, although he seldom took the time now. I picked up the larger pad and opened to a sketch of the castle ruins at the edge of town. I remembered walking there with him the previous spring and sitting a distance away working on a poem while he sketched, feeling hurt that he wouldn't show me his drawing later or ask to see what I'd written.

Isaak had captured the sense of abiding strength in the old bricks and stone, solid yet softened. But there were no people in the scene, none of the picnickers or lovers reading to each other on their blankets whom I had watched in jealousy, none of the small children running with their dogs. And he had drawn the branches of the chestnut tree rising above the ruins bare of their leaves, like blackened bones. I felt a small chill: Isaak had drawn this scene only a few weeks before the Germans had come with their bombs.

For a few moments more I stood there, breathing in Isaak's air. Tomorrow I would come back with a pot of geraniums for his windowsill. And a basket of apples, and I would take the curtains from my own bedroom window and hang them here for him. Pleased, I took off my shoes and slipped into his bed. Lying there with the scent of him on his sheets, it was easy to imagine Isaak beside me. I slipped my hand into my dress and stroked my breast softly, and felt it swell.

When I awoke, Isaak was sitting beside me. I could tell by the light it was late in the afternoon. "So you heard," he said.

I was confused; how did he know about Anneke?

"But you shouldn't have come here."

"Anneke's leaving," I said, reaching for him. "She's pregnant."

Isaak rose and looked down at me. I couldn't tell if it was worry or anger in his eyes, but as always I thrilled to have them on me alone. "You shouldn't have come here," he repeated. "What were you thinking?" He glanced at my neck.

The new decrees. I pulled out my legitimization card, which I wore around my neck on a thin cord. "I'm wearing it, Isaak. I was careful! Did you hear me? Anneke's getting married. I can't bear it if she leaves!"

"If she's pregnant, that's her own stupidity."

Isaak was always short of compassion when it came to An-neke. "She's spoiled," he often said. "She has to wear lisle stockings instead of silk now, coffee is too expensive to drink every day, and she can't see the newest films. Well, too bad. All over Europe people are losing their homes, their freedoms. Their lives."