Tamar (33 page)

None of them was able to speak for some time. Then, muttering something the others couldn’t make out, Koop took out his binoculars. He tracked slowly along the line of corpses, counting aloud, pausing occasionally to utter a string of obscenities. He’d got to forty-something when Eddy lowered his face into his hands and began to moan. Without taking his eyes from the road, Willy said softly, “May God forgive us. But I don’t think He will.” Then he rolled over onto his side, away from the others, and curled up like a child seeking sleep. But he turned his head fast enough when he heard the familiar sound of a Sten gun being cocked.

“Tamar! What —”

He looked so bad that Willy clammed up. An older, sicker version of the man who had fallen from the sky five months earlier. He was braced against the trunk of a silver birch, as though he could not trust his legs to support him. His Sten was aimed at a point halfway between himself and the three other men. Willy noticed that his hands were dirty, as if he had been digging in the ground with his fingers. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed and they were fixed on Koop. When he spoke, his voice was peculiarly unemotional.

“Let me save you the trouble, de Vries. There are one hundred and sixteen bodies. And that’s not all. By now there’ll have been mass executions in The Hague and Amsterdam and Amersfoort. Is there any good reason why I don’t shoot all three of you bastards right now?”

Koop turned onto his back and leaned up on his elbows. His right hand was not far from his own gun. He stared coldly at Tamar for a couple of seconds, then said, “Yeah. You haven’t got the guts.”

Willy flinched. He tried to speak, but his mouth went dry when Tamar levelled the Sten at Koop’s chest. He closed his eyes, waiting for the stuttering bark of the gun.

Instead he heard Tamar say, “You’re wrong, as usual. It’s true I don’t have the stomach for killing that you do. But the blood of those men is all over your hands. I want to kill you. I’d really like to kill you.”

“Yeah,” Koop said, “but like I said, you haven’t got the guts.”

It seemed to Willy that Tamar became, in an instant, a different and far more dangerous animal. He moved so fast that he seemed powered by an explosive force. He covered the short distance between himself and Koop faster than Willy could blink, and kicked Koop hard between the legs. Koop’s arms flapped madly and he fell back, his open mouth sucking in air. The hoarse gasping was cut off when Tamar put one knee on Koop’s chest and slid the muzzle of his gun into Koop’s mouth.

“Tamar! Please God, don’t!” Eddy cried. His voice was high-pitched.

Willy felt his heart jump in his chest and was shocked to realize that what he felt was a sort of grim joy that punishment was here at last. He couldn’t breathe, waiting for the dreadful thing that was about to happen to Koop.

But Tamar didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he took his left hand from the gun and pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. Then he removed the muzzle of the Sten from Koop’s mouth and shoved the paper in. Koop’s eyes bulged. His face was grey as ash.

Tamar said, “A list, Koop. The names of seventy-four of the people down there on the road. You’ll recognize some of them. I don’t know who the others were, not yet. When I do, I’ll be sure to tell you. I know where to find you.”

He stood up, looking very tired again. Willy stared at Koop’s wet glaring eyes in his colourless face, the list jammed in his mouth; heard him gagging on the paper. Willy thought that it would have been better if Tamar had shot him. This was worse.

“Go back to your hole,” Tamar said. “Stay there until you hear from me. You are not to get involved in further actions of any sort. These are direct orders from Amsterdam. Got that? As far as I am concerned, your group no longer exists.”

He eased the cocking lever of his Sten into the safety position and slung the weapon over his shoulder. He turned his back on the three men and retreated into the gloom beneath the pines. He had made no attempt to separate Koop or Eddy from their guns. When he was out of sight, Koop spat the list of the dead onto the ground.

When Trixie woke up, Rosa was still asleep in her eiderdown nest beside the bed, but Marijke had gone. There was birdsong and a milky light not strong enough to throw shadows. She found Marijke in the washhouse, stooped over the sink. When Marijke noticed her, she straightened up, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and forced a smile. Her eyes were watery.

“Marijke? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m fine. Just felt a bit sick.” She rested her back against the sink and sniffed, twice.

“Are you ill?”

“No, really. It’s nothing.”

Trixie stood in the doorway, arms folded, watching Marijke’s face. “How long has this been going on?”

“Oh, just a day or two. I feel fine most of the time.”

Trixie knew. She just knew; it made sense of things. “Marijke? Marijke, are you pregnant?”

Marijke looked down at the floor but couldn’t see it because her eyes were full of tears. “Yes,” she said.

Trixie walked over to Marijke and put her arms around her. After a while she said, “Why are you crying?”

Marijke said, “Why are
you
crying?”

“I don’t know.”

Marijke rested her cheek on the other woman’s shoulder. The light from the window dazzled her through her tears.

“Yes, you do,” she said. “You’re crying because you’re thinking what I’m thinking. That this is a terrible world to bring a child into. That this child’s father is likely to be dead before it’s born, that this child is going to grow up not knowing who its father was or what he did, and that I’m damned stupid to be pregnant.”

“Marijke, please. Don’t. I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

Marijke got control of her breathing. She went to the outside door where a towel hung on a hook and dried her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m okay. Really. I’ll make us some tea. We still have some left.”

She took the big water jug from the draining board and went to the pump. “When do you think he’ll be back?”

“Soon,” Trixie said. “Later today, certainly.”

“Perhaps.”

Trixie hardened her voice a little. “No, not perhaps. He will be back.”

“But that’s what I’m going to think every time now, isn’t it? Every time he’s not here, I’m going to think I may already have said good-bye to him. I may have already touched him for the last time. How am I going to stand it?”

Trixie didn’t offer an answer. She knew from experience that there wasn’t one.

Marijke tried to find things to do. She made several trips with the wheelbarrow, bringing into the yard the slices of the ash tree that she and Tamar had sawn two weeks ago. The task almost exhausted her. Later she walked around the yard and the buildings, touching and moving things for no reason. Behind the house she discovered that bracken had sent new growth up through the soil: nubbly green shoots, curled like the necks of violins. Or like little green sea horses. The white sky was hung with shifting grey veils.

She went to the vegetable garden, where Oma’s grave was. It had been the only place where Tamar had been able to dig deep enough into the frozen ground. She remembered the grim labour of it, Tamar stubbornly hacking the narrow pit out of the hardened soil until he was chest-deep and too exhausted to dig deeper. They had covered the mound with stones pulled from the collapsing garden wall. Now thin green plant tendrils grew among those stones. She thought about pulling them out but decided not to.

She was crossing the yard again when she sensed him; she looked up and there he was, jolting down the track, bent over the handlebars. Not riding, but being carried. He looked awful, hollowed out. It was a wonder to her that she loved someone who looked that way. She held him for a while, then led him into the kitchen. Trixie was in the old armchair by the stove, talking to Rosa about the pictures in a book. The child shrank closer to her mother’s body when she saw Tamar. He slung the Sten almost carelessly on the back of a chair and sat down. Marijke put the kettle on the stove and stood with her back to the room. She was aching to look at him but did not dare to.

Trixie said, “Tell us what’s happened.”

Tamar looked over at her, but his eyes fixed on Rosa. He gazed at the child, who was hiding her face from him.

“Tell us, Christiaan. You know you have to.”

So he told them. He told them how many men there had been, how they had died, how long it had taken, the distance the bodies had stretched along the road. He told them what he knew about the killings elsewhere. When he had finished, Marijke put a mug of tea in front of him and then sat beside him. Without looking at him, she laid her right hand on his left wrist. For a long time there was no sound in the kitchen except for the soft little ticking made by the kettle as it cooled.

Rosa was disturbed by the silence. She murmured complaints, dabbing at the pages of the book. Trixie hugged her, shushing her. Then she stood, lifting the child to her chest.

“Come on, Rosa,” she said. “Let’s go and see what those naughty chickens are up to.” On her way to the door, she rested her hand briefly on Marijke’s shoulder.

When the silence in the room became difficult to bear, Marijke said, “There’s soup left from last night. It’s not too bad.”

He didn’t respond for several seconds. Then he said, “You see things . . . sometimes you see things that make you think the rest of your life is impossible. Just seeing them damages you so much, you think, I cannot go on being human.”

Marijke wrapped her fingers over his clenched fist. He didn’t look at her.

“I keep thinking about the Germans in the firing squad. Killing and then killing again and again, looking at the faces . . . How? How did they do that? I can’t . . . I can’t even imagine. But, the thing is, if you took one of those men and stripped away the uniform, and sat him next to me, how different would we be? Would you be able to see murder on his skin? Smell murder on his breath? And not on mine?”

She could not tell if he expected an answer. She did not have one.

“I feel,” he said, “I feel . . .” He searched for the word; the fingers of his right hand moved as if he were blind and groping for it. “Diminished. Ashamed. Because I watched all that killing, and when it was over, do you know what I wanted to do? I wanted to kill someone. Anyone. It seemed the only possible reaction to what I’d seen.”

“I understand that,” she said. But she was thinking, Stop this. Please stop this, because I am going to have your baby. Let’s talk about that, instead.

Then he did look at her, and she flinched.

“Do you?” he said. “Well, I’m glad you do, because I damn well don’t. All this shit, this year-in, year-out bloody nightmare, is about difference, isn’t it? We tell ourselves we’re different from them. That we’re not like the Nazis. But this morning, I watched while they murdered a hundred and sixteen people. So I wanted to kill
them
. The sickness in those men, those Germans? It’s in me too.”

She said, “Yes, it probably is. And that’s why we’re fighting, remember? We’re fighting for the right to choose not to be evil.”

He pulled his hand free of hers. “I’m not sure. I don’t know if we can be good after all this.”

“I don’t know either, but that’s not what I said.”

She suddenly couldn’t stay with him. She stood, and he looked up at her, puzzled.

She said, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

She went to the door and looked back at him. “Trixie’s going back to the asylum this afternoon. Maybe there are things Ernst needs to know.”

“No. Ernst knows everything.”

She was halfway across the yard before it occurred to her to wonder what he’d meant.

Later they all ate the watered-down warmed-up soup, not speaking much. After Trixie had laboured up to the road, Tamar fetched the heavy splitting axe and carried it on his shoulder to the pile of wood that Marijke had lugged into the yard.

Towards the end of the afternoon, when the low red sun peered under the curtain of cloud for a last moment, she went out to him. He had formed the split chunks of ash into a flat pyramid against the wall of the barn. He had built it with great care, each wedge snug to the next. She held her arms out, palms upwards, and he loaded her with as much wood as she could carry. It smelled like the leaves of a new book.

In the kitchen she fed the stove and opened the air vent, then went into the washhouse and found her grandmother’s big jam pan and the cauldron they boiled washing in. She filled them with water from the pump and heaved them up onto the stove next to the kettle. She sat in the darkening kitchen for almost half an hour, waiting for the water to heat, wondering about the life she had inside her. Was it the size of a fingernail? Less than that? It was strange that something so tiny, just a little gathering of blind cells, could make her feel so tired, so altered.

The room was warm now, and it was hard for her to get up from the old armchair. She went out to the washhouse again and lifted the zinc bathtub from the hook on the back wall and dragged it into the kitchen, positioning it on the worn rug in front of the stove. She was immediately taken back to her childhood, to a particular memory. She’d come indoors from play, after supper. It was harvesttime. How old had she been? Six? She’d had one of the new kittens, the one with gummy eyes, in her arms. Taking her shoes off in the hall, she’d heard laughter. The air in the kitchen was thickened by steam and by dusty light beamed in from the window. It smelled unusual. Her grandmother was kneeling on the floor beside the stove next to the bathtub, this bathtub, with the soapy flannel in her hand. Her grandfather was sitting in the tub, his hair wet, his pipe in his mouth, a glass of beer in his hand. His face and neck and the lower parts of his arms were a lovely colour, like sunlight on the bricks of the barn. The rest of him was white as milk. His clothes were strewn over the armchair. Both of them, Oma and Opa, looked round at her, smiling.

Happy.
Happy.
Marijke tried the word in her mouth, speaking it aloud in the shadowy kitchen. She emptied cold water from the jug into the bath and then added the boiling water from the kettle. After lighting the lamp and drawing the curtains, she went outside.