River in the Sea (29 page)

“I don’t have enough,” Tine said. Leen didn’t tell her what she had done with hers. What did it matter now? She took one and ripped it in half and waved it back and forth, snapping it in the air.

Mr. Boonstra, also in his blue coverall, crossed over and kissed Mem on the cheek. “The war is over!” he shouted, and he put his arms around Mem and started to dance, and Mem shook her head at first but then she joined him, doing a dance the old timers knew, the moves a clever mix of stomps and turns and kicks. The wood soles of the
klompen
drummed the beat of the song.

“Mem is dancing!” Renske said.

“I know!” Leen swung Renske around. “So are we!”

Suddenly Mem pushed away. “
Nee, nee
,” she said, her smile fading.

Mr. Boonstra put his arm around her mother. It made Leen bristle, even though the way he pulled her in, close to his shoulder, not his hip, was a brother’s touch. Still, she had never seen Mem stand so close to another man besides her father.

“Aafke, hey,” Mr. Boonstra said, his voice a baritone. “You’ll be dancing with your man soon.”

Mem nodded, then collapsed, letting Mr. Boonstra hold her up. But with her free hand, she still waved her orange kerchief.

Leen turned away. Everywhere she looked there was a smile. Everywhere she heard laughter and Issac, standing in front of her, still sang and shouted. For one moment her joy wavered. Then she thought of Pater. Wherever he was, he’d want her to savor this moment. She could hear him say it:
Leentje, pay attention to this! Enjoy it
, poppie! 

Jakob walked towards them. She thought he’d come for Issac, but aside from clapping his hand on his shoulder and shouting something and nodding furiously, he walked up to her. “We are liberated!” he said.

On impulse, Leen grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him. Tine shouted her name with a giggle and Issac groaned, “Ah,
ver skrikelik
!”

Jakob swung her around and laughed. “We are liberated!” he said again. They kissed once more and then Jakob turned to Issac, flushing red, and Issac smacked him on the arm. Leen laughed too, willing herself not to look at her mother. Yes, it was real. 

They were liberated. The war was, unofficially, over.

One less thing to wait for.

The next day arrived, enough time for the shock and the highest levels of joy to wear off, and the need to do something, to tidy up the messiness of liberation, took over. That and the need for a good road. The half–tracks had grooved deep ruts into the bricks, crumbling the road in minutes. The fact that Blaskowitz hadn’t yet officially surrendered and that the Germans hadn’t exited the islands didn’t seem to hinder the sudden appearance of cars and motorcycles that hadn’t seen daylight in five years. Leen had no idea that so many people had hid away their autos, and she had no idea how they did it. Their truck was still torn apart on the barn floor.

By mid–morning crowds were outside with shovels and pitchforks and rickety and creaking wheelbarrows, and when Issac appeared in the kitchen wearing his blue coverall again and holding all the gear he could carry, everyone followed when he said, “Come on, everyone’s already out there.” Even Mem worked outside, poking at the ground with an old rake, wearing a strained smile on her face. 

Leen worked in a line, shoveling up chunks of the road, broken bricks and crumbling dirt, and loading them into the wheelbarrows and carts. A Canadian truck came through and unloaded new bricks, and as soon as a section was cleared, a new group began to lay down the pieces of the new road, the colors so much brighter and redder than the old. She watched the men and a handful of women putting down new brick. They argued playfully with each other over the patterns created by the interplay of old and new, snatching individual pieces that featured a particular grain or color, even though it wouldn’t take long for the bricks to dull and the road would look like it used to, old and worn and familiar. Everyone around her was energized by the work, and Leen felt it too, her muscles awakening as they lifted heavy shovelfuls and flung them easily into the wheelbarrow. She spied Jakob Hoffman ahead of her, wearing the coverall too, the armband always spotless, and more than once his shovelful of dirt and bricks missed the wheelbarrow. She imagined working next to him, teasing him while showing off.

Now and then Tine left to fill pitchers of water for everyone, doing what she felt she could do best. Mem helped Renske, who used her hands and a garden trowel and never once complained. Issac worked alongside them for a little while, but then he moved up near Jakob. Soon there was a group of men all in blue, and Leen wondered if they were pulled to one another like schoolgirls, or if there was a reason they always formed a rank. She started to edge her way up the line when shouts broke out amid the conversations and the singing. At first Leen didn’t pay attention, distracted by trying to get close. She figured it was someone like her brother or Jakob or another blue–backed man horsing with another. There were more. Leen paused, trying to make out the words, but they’d been out for two hours now and the voices around her never stopped. People yelled to one another every few seconds, delivering directions, telling jokes, but here the shouting was different, and it kept growing more frantic. “Hey! Hey!” she heard. “Hold him up!”

“What is going on?” Leen asked Tine, who had found her with a glass of water. She took the water but didn’t drink from it. She laid down her shovel and strained to see over the shoulders in front of her.

“I don’t believe it,” Tine said, her mouth dropping into an O. “They’ve found him!”

“Really?” Leen grabbed Tine’s arm. She pushed the man in front of her, spilling the water, and he grunted in reply. “Tine, did they?!” Wings beat inside her chest. “Is it really him?” she screeched, unable to control her voice. This was how it would happen; this was it – in the one moment when it was not at the forefront of her mind. Yes! She looked at Tine’s face and nearly started to jump up and down, needing to move and at the same time waiting for someone to yank her forward and say, “Look, there is your father!” 

“Leen, Leentje,
nee
,
nee
, shhh, shhh,” Tine said. She held Leen’s face with both hands. Leen tried to shake them off but Tine wouldn’t let go. “Stop it. It’s not Pater. It’s Jan Fokke. They found him. They found Jan Fokke.”

“Oh,” Leen said too quickly. She put a hand over Tine’s and tried to smile. “Really, is it him?” She stopped smiling. It felt like something fell away from her mouth, something solid that fell and shattered on the ground.

Of course. She picked up his name in the choir of voices surrounding her, heard the whispers from the crowd that didn’t rush forward but hung back to spread the word among themselves and into the wind, where it would dissolve and become part of what everyone simply knew. Jan Fokke was found alive, dirty and bewildered, far too thin and so weak he needed two sets of arms to support him. But he was alive.

Tine hugged her. Her eyes were wet. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know, I know. I know exactly what you mean,” she added, even though Leen had said nothing more.

19.

Leen told the others she was going out for silk.

Bright swaths of aqua, orange, yellow, and scarlet decorated the open fields. The L.O. had secretly stockpiled parachutes for the Allied forces, keeping them hidden just as the boys stayed hidden during harvest, inside hollowed-out pyramids of that season’s crop, stowed in plain sight. Everyone wanted the silk now, for new shirts with cuffs and collars that didn’t scratch or show a stain from two wearers ago. Leen knew what color blouse she would have: red.

Truthfully, it wasn’t the silk that drew her out. It was the itch to get out, to touch something, to hear something, anything to placate the restlessness that boiled inside her. At home, she dug her fingernails into her palms, into other fingers, little traitors all part of the same hand.

She set out alone on her bicycle, following the familiar lanes towards Dokkum. With a scissors in her pocket and an empty bag over her shoulder, she rode slowly, scanning the striped fields. There was no need to hurry, now that the camp was no longer occupied by German soldiers.

The Canadians stayed there now, filling it with sepia uniforms instead of gray. They had taken down the German flags, the red swastika ripped into shreds and strewn across the grass like bits of stamen withered and dying. It was a beautiful day, fitting of the occasion, with a warm breeze and new blossoms. Daffodils were always the first to open, and pots of yellow blooms atop green tubular stalks waved from doorsteps and flowerbeds along every street. Just beyond the German camp – Leen couldn’t help but still think of it that way – an entire field of daffodils bloomed, a beautiful gold block set off against the green of the scattered trees and the bright blue sky. 

Men milled about, leaning against poles, tents, each other, just like the Germans had, but the mood was entirely different. They appeared fed and well–stocked. They smiled and waved. Leen couldn’t help worrying that the scene might change in an instant and it would be back to the way it was before, the way it had been mere days ago, even though the soldiers had been so lacking in supplies that they stole hens and asked politely for a
lytse
bit of cooking oil. It was no wonder Jan Fokke had returned as skin and bones, barely able to walk.

Issac reported it was believed he’d been kept at the camp, dressed as a German soldier, right under their noses. He’d been discovered in a ditch just inside Wierum, crouching, and someone had spotted him and first thought it was a soldier trying to hide out. Those were the first shouts Leen had heard. While working some L.O. had run close, ordering any weapons down, but then Jan Fokke raised his head. He hadn’t said anything, just looked at the men running to him and waited. They hoisted him out of the ditch and Issac said his smell was so bad that the men nearly threw up. Jan Fokke hadn’t bathed, that much was clear, and probably had soiled himself more than once. Before they took him to his mother they washed him down as best they could and dressed him in a fresh L.O. uniform, burning the rags he’d been wearing. He didn’t speak at all until his mother laid eyes on him and shrieked, nearly fainting. “
Moeder
,” he said. When Mem had heard that, she cried. 

Leen suddenly braked. What if Pater was right under their noses, just like Jan Fokke? What if he was right in Wierum, in a false wall, in somebody’s cellar? What if he was under some type of heap, like the manure piles or the hay bales, stacked high and neat, enough room for a man to stretch his arms? But he’d be home by now. The small void inside, the hole that itched from the inside out, opened up and everything inside her felt desperate, ravenous, frenetic. She did not know how much longer she could go on unknowing.

She started pedaling again. She swerved amid the upturned chunks of road the half–tracks had ruptured and stopped. She watched a soldier pour gasoline into a tub and then take his shirt off, put it into the tub and begin to wash it. 

“That’ll stink,” a man said, parking his bike next to Leen. Leen looked around. She had been staring so intently at the camp that she hadn’t noticed at least ten others with her, standing over or next to their bicycles, gazing at the new occupiers. At least half of them were girls. A few of them held folded segments of silk.

“They’re airing them out, see? Over there, on the line,” another said, pointing. “What a funny way to wash their clothes.” The soldiers had run a clothesline from the radio tower to the main tent and a line of shirts, pants, and underclothes flapped in the wind.

“The smell will air out eventually, don’t you think?” a girl said.

“I hope so,” another answered. They giggled. “Should we bring them proper soap?”

“I think they look clean enough.” More laughter. Leen’s cheeks prickled. It was warm, hot even. She took off her sweater and tied it around her waist.

“It almost doesn’t look right,” the man who spoke first said, ignoring the girls. “Seeing them there instead of the others.” He looked at Leen. It was impossible to tell his age. He was deeply wrinkled, but his posture and frame was that of a younger man. He was probably a fisherman; their skin aged first before their joints.

“I know,” Leen said. She smiled openly at him to show she wasn’t like the other girls there, foolish and coy. “I suppose we’re not used to it. How long do you think they’ll stay?” 

The old man shrugged. “The idiots on the island still won’t give up. After that, I don’t know.” He stuck a bent finger inside the side of his mouth to loosen a bit of tobacco. He was missing his front teeth, the gums a browning shade of pink. “But I sure am glad they’re here.”

Leen smiled again at the man and said, “
Doeie
.” She tried to pedal off but the road got worse. It was more torn apart than put together, and each side of the lane was filled with tufts of sod where the wide half–tracks had gone over.

She made it less than a quarter–kilometer. “The road is
ver skrikelik
,” she muttered to herself. 

“Yes, it is pretty bad.”

Leen knew that soft voice. Minne faced her, straddling her bike. Her hair was combed but straight, her mouth forcing a smile, but without her red lipstick, it shrank into her face. 

“Leen,” Minne said. Her face was the color of milk. “I’ve been looking for you. It seems I’ve been hunting you down quite a bit lately.”

“I’ve been home,” Leen said, her tongue thick in her mouth. She was not prepared to see Minne and at first she could not help feeling a flash of joy. Just as quickly she was filled with gall. She had tried not to think of her but it had been difficult not to wonder – what happened after she’d run? Had Minne run off? Did she stay inside her home when the Canadians came through her town?
Think
, Leen told herself,
think
.
Prepare
.
Do not act rashly
. She felt the scissors. She did not know why she might need them but their presence reassured her nonetheless.