Tamar (19 page)

During the night the wind had swung from west to north. The morning was bright and bitingly cold; the puddles in the yard and the water in the fields glittered like shards of glass. Marijke was alone. Tamar had left for the dropping zone at daybreak. Her grandmother was still in the village of Loenen, where her cousin’s daughter was recovering from the difficult birth of a son. Marijke had nursed the stove back to life with tiny doses of wood, then gone out to see if any of the chickens had managed to produce an egg. Halfway to the barn she stopped, somehow aware that she was being watched. She felt the usual flash of fear, then turned.

A woman and a child stood motionless where the track from the road came into the yard. Marijke’s first thought was that they were ghosts. They were colourless, as if they had leaked all their blood. Their hair did not move in the wind. Their faces were all bones. The boy had what looked like a threadbare rug wrapped around his shoulders; the woman was supporting a bike with a warped front wheel that had no tyre.

“Can I help you?” Marijke said, and instantly felt absurd because it was something that a hotel receptionist might say.

The boy looked up at the woman as if expecting her to say something. When she didn’t, he looked back at Marijke. “Please. We have a good watch. We need some food to take home.”

She took them into the kitchen, and the woman started to lose consciousness just inside the door, perhaps because the room was a few degrees warmer. Marijke grabbed her by the slack of her coat as she fell and managed to get her to the sagging armchair by the stove, where she slumped with her eyes closed.

The child said, “Is she dead?”

“No. Your mummy isn’t dead. She’s just fainted.”

“She’s not my mum,” the child said. “I think she’s my aunt.”

Marijke slid the heavy kettle onto the hot plate. The woman did, in fact, look like a corpse, and Marijke felt panic rise inside her body. She turned to the boy. “You look terribly cold. Take those wet clothes off and stand close to the stove.” She lifted the rug off him, but the child didn’t move. She went to the cupboard and found a tablecloth. “Here. Wrap this around yourself.”

Still the child didn’t move. Marijke draped the tablecloth around him, then reached beneath it and pulled the pathetic wet clothes off. They were, she realized, the remains of a school uniform. She hung them on the stove rail, wondering about lice. The boy stank like a rats’ nest. Marijke made weak tea and poured two cups, adding a spoonful of precious sugar to each. The boy’s eyes never left her. They were sunk deep in his face, like two black marbles pressed into putty.

“Have you come far?” she asked him.

He seemed to find the question difficult, so she said, “Where are you from?”

The woman spoke for the first time. “Utrecht.” The word was a faint murmur.

“
Utrecht?
You’ve walked here from Utrecht? Dear God. How long has it taken you?”

The woman struggled to sit upright. She wrapped her hands around the cup that Marijke held out to her. “We left three days ago. Things are very bad there.”

“Yes,” Marijke said, “I’ve heard. But to have come so far . . .”

“There are so many of us on the roads now,” the woman told her. “From Amsterdam, Rotterdam, everywhere. The farmers say they have nothing left to give us. Some of them chase us away. We have to go farther and farther each time.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Yes. We have to. We have extra people to feed.” The woman had shocked herself. She shouldn’t have said that. “I mean we have relatives staying,” she said hurriedly. “Not, I mean . . .”

Marijke put a hand on the woman’s arm. “It’s all right. I understand.”

“The tea was nice,” the boy said. Wrapped in the white tablecloth, holding the cup in both hands, he looked like a shrunken priest.

Marijke filled their cups again, and when she turned back from the stove, the woman had produced a man’s pocket watch from somewhere inside her clothes.

“It’s a good one,” she said. “Real silver, the chain as well. It was my father’s. Please.”

Marijke could not meet the woman’s eyes. “Oh, no, no. I couldn’t. I don’t need —”

The woman made sounds like a wounded dog. She seized Marijke’s wrist and tried to stuff the watch into her hand. “Please, please. It’s all we have left. We’ll take anything, anything, won’t we, Anton?”

The boy turned his face away.

Marijke closed the woman’s hands around the watch. “No, listen. Please hush. Don’t cry. I will give you something. Please stop crying. What I mean is I don’t want your father’s watch. Keep it.”

The woman wiped her face with the wet cuff of her coat sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s all right.”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I can’t go back empty-handed. You’ve no idea how they’ll look at me. I can’t face it.”

“When did you last eat?”

“Yesterday. A woman in a cottage gave us some boiled potatoes. There weren’t enough to take home. We had to eat them all. We had to keep going.”

Marijke melted a few chunks of pork fat in the skillet, then washed and sliced two potatoes and fried them with an onion. She couldn’t watch them eat; it was too desperate. She went upstairs to the closet and dug out a woollen cardigan, a sweater, two pairs of socks, and a heavy tweed jacket that had belonged to her grandfather. She had nothing that could replace the wretched shoes.

She returned to the kitchen to find the hunger trippers wiping the fat from the skillet with the crusts of their bread. She went down to the cellar and brought up a jar of bottled plums; the woman and the boy stared at them as if they were fat rubies looted from some fabulous treasury. When the boy had eaten his plums, he put the stones back in his mouth and sucked them. Later, when he was dressed, he took the stones from his mouth and put them in the pocket of the tweed jacket, which came down below his knees.

The woman and the child left the farm carrying unimaginable riches: a cabbage, a chunk of bacon, a bag of flour, four eggs, several potatoes, and a few beetroot. And bread and cheese for the journey. The woman had asked for the bacon to be cut into several small pieces.

“If the Germans stop us,” she said, “we will give them one piece. They will not think that we could have more.” By then she had recovered some of her dignity. “I want you to have the watch. It is the difference between trading and begging.”

Marijke shook her head. “No. And you are not beggars. I cannot believe your courage; I wish I had half as much.”

“Then I will pray for you.”

“Thank you. I may well need it.”

She walked with them up to the road. The woman, and then the boy, shook her hand very formally.

“Look,” Marijke said, “I, er, I don’t know exactly how to say this, but . . .”

In fact, she knew exactly how to say it: by the way, this farm is the operations centre for the local resistance; my lover runs it from here; there is a wireless station in the barn; there are British guns in the house; and no matter how calm I seem, I am shit-scared most of the time.

“Others, others like you. You won’t tell them, will you? It’s not that I don’t want to help, but . . . It’s difficult, people coming here. Do you understand?”

They looked at her with expressionless faces. Then the woman forced a smile. “Of course. I doubt I could tell anyone how to find you anyway. It’s the back of beyond, this place.”

Marijke stood and watched them walk away until they were lost in the broken shadows of the winter trees. She never saw them again.

Marijke fought off sleep for most of that night. She was very afraid that her dreams might be even more terrible than the black bubbles of anxiety that rose in her chest. Whenever she began to drift, unbearable images, like clips from silent horror movies, flashed into her head. Tamar caught exposed at the dropping zone, his face lit white by German torches. Tamar torn by bullets, waiting to die in a ditch. Tamar’s body burning in the fiery skeleton of a car.

When at last she did fall asleep, she dreamed none of these things. She dreamed she was the starving woman from Utrecht, walking slowly and peaceably across a vast field of snow. The boy with her was her son. She knew this even though the child was so swathed in blankets that his face was invisible. Occasionally she would look back and see that their footprints had disappeared, although no snow was falling. They arrived at the gates of a great city of brightly lit towers and warm busy streets. The houses had windows of richly coloured glass. She turned to the child beside her and began to unwrap him, pulling away blanket after blanket, but when the last one dropped onto the snow, there was no one and nothing inside it. She looked up and saw a crowd of people standing just inside the gates, watching her with expressionless faces.

Shortly after nine o’clock the following morning, she heard the distant growl of a motor. She went to the chest under the window and took out the Sten. Then she ran to the dairy and pulled back the sacking curtain from the window. When the asylum ambulance jolted into view, she leaned her forehead against the cold wall and let out her breath.

She went outside, shouldering the gun. Dart was driving, with Trixie beside him, holding Rosa on her lap. As soon as he saw her, Dart brought the ambulance to a stop and stumbled out, mimicking an old man with a bad back.

“God,” he said, “they call this an ambulance, but driving it is enough to kill you.”

She managed a smile for him, but her eyes were on the back of the ambulance, which was shifting and creaking on its ancient springs. When she saw Tamar’s legs swing out, she felt a melting surge of relief and her smile became genuine. He was wearing a green knitted cap, its crown tweaked into a point. For a beard, he’d slit open a field dressing and teased out the white cotton wadding, then tied it around his chin. She laughed aloud because it was the worst
Sinterklaas
costume she’d ever seen. He cradled a number of packages in his arms.

“Ho, ho, ho!” he said. “Merry bloody Christmas! Now, feed that stove, Miss Maartens. We’re starving.”

During the night before Christmas Eve, winter took hold of Holland and clenched its fist. All slow water froze, and the naked trees groaned beneath their sudden heavy coats of ice. Marijke turned in her sleep, pressing herself against Tamar’s back, shaping the angle of her legs to match his, seeking his warmth. When she opened her eyes, she saw fernlike growths of thick frost on the inside of the window.

Later, when she and Tamar went out into the yard, the mud had solidified into frost-capped peaks and ripples that looked like mountain ranges seen from the cockpit of an aircraft. The black barbs of the hawthorn hedge were encased in melted glass. The world had become so silent and brittle that it seemed dangerous to speak. Then the chickens exploded from under the barn door, gabbling their outrage at this turn of events.

Tamar was happy. Incredible riches had fallen from the sky because he had summoned them. There had been every chance that he would die trying to gather them in, but he was alive and had returned to where his life was. This new harshness of the weather would make his work more difficult, but with any luck it would hamper the German forces even more. They were pitiless and heavily armoured, but they were far from home and must by now smell defeat on the freezing air, like dinosaurs at the beginning of the ice age. He took the saw and the axe and attacked the heap of stumps and branches stacked to dry in the big barn. When he heaved the loaded wheelbarrow over to the kitchen, it jolted so heavily on the frozen ground that his teeth clacked.

Later in the morning, Marijke called him, urgently. She had already set off along the track to meet her grandmother. The old woman was a dark humped shape supporting itself on a staff; she looked like a tragic character from an ancient tale. She moved slowly and cautiously over the frozen ground. When they reached her and took her arms, she nodded her head but was too exhausted to smile. Tamar saw that where her grey hair was not covered by the woollen scarf it was filmed with ice and resembled twists of steel. She had obviously fallen at least once; the skirts of her coat were soiled down one side. He was awed by her obstinate strength, her endurance.

When they got her into the kitchen, she was too cold to sit. She leaned with her arms braced on the stove rail, glassy-eyed and breathing like an exhausted swimmer. After a while Tamar was able to lift the old haversack from her back and manoeuvre her into the armchair. Marijke made tea and kneeled in front of her grandmother.

“It’s real tea, Oma, with sugar. Christiaan got it for us, and lots of other things too. We’re going to be all right now. Really.”

The old woman took the cup. Her fingertips were white. She looked over at Tamar. There was a blankness in her eyes, almost a lack of recognition, that disturbed him.

Marijke said, “Oma, how are things at Loenen? How are Greet and the baby?”

Julia stared into her cup, then slowly shook her head.

Dart had become so unused to good feelings that he’d acquired the habit of examining them like a careful shopkeeper who’d been paid with a big banknote. Test the paper between the fingers. Hold it up to the light. Squint at the customer, looking for the slightest flicker of dishonesty. But on this bitterly cold Christmas Eve afternoon, the happiness was genuine.

He had survived the dreadful night of the supply drop. It had probably been a mistake to take the last of the Benzedrine before they set out, because his nerves had fizzed and popped all night like a severed power cable on a wet road. On the other hand, he had not experienced a single moment of tiredness or loss of concentration. And the two bottles of pills he’d requested had been sent, to his enormous relief. Agatha had interpreted his drug-sparked chatter as an attempt to put her at her ease. At the asylum they’d staggered out of the heavily laden ambulance, and she’d embraced and kissed him, which was startling. When they’d carried in the sacks of flour and milk powder, the cans of meat and treacle and jam, the coffee, tea, sugar, he’d been greeted like a hero. In the shadowy kitchen the nuns had fluttered and pounced like magpies at a road-killed rabbit.