Hunger Journeys (28 page)

Silence took hold of the room for a few moments. Mevrouw Wijman stepped away from both girls. “Good girl. Bad girl. Whatever you are, you’d better get busy helping Lena make the supper. I am going to go lie down.” And she did.

With Sofie’s arrival, Lena almost forgot about the conversation with Annie about the Resistance. When she did think of it, she was sure that Annie would do the runs herself or find someone else. How could Lena be a Resistance worker with a lover of the enemy sharing her very bed?

But the conversation had taken place, and it turned out that Annie had no intention of making other plans. Almost a week passed.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon, she walked into the kitchen and spoke. “My bed is much bigger than Lena’s, Mother,” she said, her voice crisp. “It doesn’t make sense for the two of them to share that tiny cot. Lena should come in with me.”

Sofie’s two days’ grace had passed with no further mention of her banishment. Lena had watched in bemused shock as Sofie put a brand-new, and perfectly selected, strategy to work. It turned out that Sofie could clean. At first, she just followed Vrouw Wijman’s angry instructions, passed through Lena, since Vrouw Wijman would neither look at Sofie nor speak to her. Then she started asking questions, still through Lena: questions about cleaning, about getting out stains, about reaching those
hard-to-reach spots. On the second day, she made several suggestions that drew Vrouw Wijman’s brows high on her forehead and gave her eyes a glitter that Lena had not seen before.

On the third day, instead of seeing Sofie onto the street, Lena watched, surprised and pleased, as Vrouw Wijman entered deep into conference with her about what might work best to remove those grass stains from Bennie’s pants.

And on that Wednesday afternoon, while Sofie scrubbed away in the kitchen under Vrouw Wijman’s watchful eye, Lena packed her few things into her small suitcase and moved upstairs. Annie did not come with her, and she seemed to take little note of her through the rest of the day. Lena went about her tasks in some bewilderment, and quite unsure, as well, about whether she was pleased with this new arrangement, although she did look forward to a peaceful night. The last few nights’ sleep had been spotty at best, shared as they were with a companion who kicked and wriggled and yanked at the bedding, not to mention moaning over her lost love.

At bedtime that night, Lena found out why Annie had orchestrated the change. Lena undressed shyly and tucked herself into the bed right up against the wall, determined to be no bother. Annie, on the other hand, shucked her clothes off and slithered into her nightgown with no attention to privacy, and positively bounced into bed.

“I should have thought of this ages ago!” she said.

“Why did you?” Lena asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? When can we talk with you downstairs and people always about? Now, with Sofie here, it’s impossible! And so I thought, Bed. That’s the place to talk!”

All in a moment, Lena’s brain cleared. “The Resistance,” she said.

“Yes,” Annie replied. “Didn’t you realize?”

Lena had not.

“Hey, I almost forgot,” Annie said gleefully, and she slid out of bed and rooted around on the floor for a minute. “Look what I’ve got for you!” Back in bed, she held out something.

Lena’s identity card. She took it, and Annie brought the candle close so she could see. There she was. Herself. Lena Berg. And as closely as she peered, she could see nothing wrong. The card did not even look unnaturally new. Relief swept through her—relief of a worry she hadn’t even known she was carrying.

They whispered together for a long time that night after the card was tucked away and the candle blown out. Or Annie whispered and Lena listened.

Annie explained that a large part of Resistance work involved supplying ration cards for people in hiding. Many operations existed to steal ration cards in large quantities. Then they had to be delivered to those who bought food for the hidden. Without weekly ration cards, the hidden people would starve.

“And that’s where girls like us come in,” Annie said. “Nobody notices us … most of the time.”

It sounded simple enough, but Lena’s determination to become a doer of good waned as the night wore on. The risk was death. Death! Perhaps she should say she had changed her mind. But she did not say that, and eventually the two girls lay down, and to Lena’s surprise, she slept.

On Thursday morning, Lena awoke in the pitch dark. Annie was leaning over her, invisible but breathy. “Shhh,” Annie said fiercely. “Here are your instructions.”

Lena sat up abruptly.

Heart pounding, she waited.

“I’m going to show you the route today,” Annie said. “I have the cards. You don’t need to know anything about where they came from. You just take them from me and give them to the man who answers the door if he says, ‘Hello, Elsa. What do you have for me today?’ And that’s it. That’s all.”

Lena could not see Annie’s face, and Annie could not see hers. “That’s it? That’s all? It sounds like a lot to me!”

“Well, it’s not. We’ll leave right after lunch. We’ll just tell Mother that we’re taking Bennie for a bike ride. Then next week, you can go on your own. It’s only once a week.”

“But what about Sofie?”

“What about Sofie? She’s got nothing to do with this. Just keep it to yourself!”

“But what if she …”

Annie reached out and grabbed Lena’s arm. “Look. This work is important. You know you can’t say anything to Sofie. And she’s not allowed to leave the house. She’ll just think you’re off for a bike ride, that’s all.”

It sounded so simple when Annie said it. Lena shrugged the hand off. “Fine. A bike ride after lunch,” she said, and wriggled back down into the bed. She did not have to get up quite yet.

She turned her back on the other girl and tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use. What had she agreed to do?

Vrouw Wijman was gruff that morning, more demanding than usual, if that was possible. In the first days after Sofie’s arrival, Lena had seen her shake with tension when her husband was at home. He stayed away a great deal, though, and as long as he was not there, Vrouw Wijman was easily distracted by cleaning. When he was in the house, Sofie kept her distance. She and Lena and Annie took to eating their dinner early, with Bennie, and thus peace was maintained, fragile though it might be.

Wijman had not asked Lena for help of any kind since she rebuffed him in the kitchen, and though she had felt his eyes on her many times, he had not once touched her since then. He didn’t even look at Sofie. It was almost as if Sofie were a powder keg and his eyes and hands matches. He was afraid of the explosion and took no risks.

As Lena washed windows that Thursday morning, while Bennie played nearby and Sofie scrubbed the floor, she almost wondered if she could relax where Wijman was concerned. Drudgery, she could handle. After all, she had been raised to it. But Resistance work? Lena gritted her teeth and rubbed a little harder.

While Wijman and Vrouw Wijman were eating their noon dinner that day, Sofie scrubbed at a pot that Lena had burned, Annie read in a chair she had pulled over beside the stove and Lena kept Bennie entertained on the floor near Annie’s feet. A second parcel would go off to Amsterdam in a few days. She relaxed into imaginings of her mother’s excitement over a bit of butter and some flour.

Then Annie looked up from her book. “Lena and I are going to take Bennie out for a ride this afternoon,” she said, tossing her hair out of her eyes.

Sofie turned around from the sink, her expression startled.

“A ride?” That was Vrouw Wijman.

“Yes, a bicycle ride. He’ll love it!”

Vrouw Wijman stared at her daughter.

Lena watched the exchange and then shocked herself by joining in. “We had such fun on Saturday, the three of us!” she said. “We thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to get out into the country?” She looked at Sofie and added impulsively, “I wish you could come, Sofie. It would do you so much good to get out of the house!”

Vrouw Wijman turned her gaze on Lena. Her husband looked up from his plate. “Sofie knows she’s not going anywhere,” he said. “The rest of them, why not? No need for them to stay cooped up here.”

And that was the end of it. Bennie wriggled with excitement, their quiet game forgotten. Lena stood up to help Sofie at the sink.

“You never told me,” Sofie whispered. “Why are you keeping secrets?”

Annie elbowed in, dishtowel in hand. “I’ll dry,” she said.

“They don’t need you there, Sofie,” Vrouw Wijman said. “You can spend the afternoon polishing silver. You know where the things are.”

Twenty minutes later, Bennie was strapped into the child seat and Lena was pedalling after Annie right across the market square, illegal ration cards weighing like a lead brick inside her clothes. They passed two SS officers leaning on a car and talking. Lena waited for them to shout, “Halt!” but they did not. On the girls went, along the northeast side of the canal that ended in the square. They crossed a bridge over another canal, and town turned to country. Lena was flooded with something that could only be called joy. This was even better than Sunday’s walk along the River Aa. The road along the canal stretched forever in front of them, green fields on their right. Train tracks followed the canal on the other side, but not the same ones that had brought their train to Almelo. Lena felt the sun on her shoulder. They were cycling northwest.

The breeze blew her hair away behind her. Bennie laughed and held on to her waist.

Her hunger journey with her sister flitted into her mind and out again. Maybe it was the comparatively full stomach,
maybe it was the signs of spring, but this ride had fun about it. That ride had not.

Annie looked back over her shoulder, and Lena grinned. Annie grinned back. “Not so bad, eh?” she shouted.

Too soon, Annie turned onto a dirt track leading to a farm. She pulled to a stop off to one side. “Make a note of these trees,” she said. “There’s no sign.”

Lena looked at her blankly.

“For next time,” Annie said. “Come on, Lena. Think!”

Lena started at the words
next time.
She had forgotten about next time, about this time, even about the war. She was not pleased to be brought back.

“I’ll wait for you here,” Annie said.

Lena opened her mouth to protest, but she changed her mind.

“Fine,” she said, and remounted. The bicycle wobbled as she adjusted to Bennie’s weight and the rough ground. Tension flooded through her as she approached the farmhouse. It was rundown, hardly looked lived in, but she dismounted, wheeled right up to the door and knocked. Almost instantly, the door opened. A man, a very tall man, looked down at her.

“Hello, Elsa. What do you have for me today?” he said.

Lena stood, frozen. Then she said, “Oh, yes,” and dug through the layers of her clothing to unearth the ration cards. She handed them over.

“Thank you, Elsa,” he said as he took them. His smile was warm. “See you next week.” And he closed the door, gently, in her face.

Lena could see Annie’s relief from the moment she turned the bend in the track and the other girl came into view. “Did you …? Did it …?” she asked, wheeling her bicycle forward as Lena slowed to a stop.

“Yes, yes. It all went fine. Now let’s go,” Lena said. And it had gone fine. She felt a small blush of pride and exhilaration. It
had
gone fine. The ride home, she discovered, could be even better than the ride away.

The week flew by.

The second food packet, this time with no beef, went off with Bosse on Monday. He had made it safely to Amsterdam and back, and insisted that all had gone well, though to Lena he looked more worn than he had, as if he had returned from a dark place.

He brought no note from her family. Her father had answered the door, he said, taken the packet and said a curt thank you. That was all. Bosse hadn’t seen anyone else. Lena stamped down the hurt as she placed the new packet in his hands. Thanks or no, she was glad that he was willing to go again. And almost glad that she had other things to think about.

Twice that week, Lena took Bennie on short rides in response to his incessant begging. Each time she felt happier, more confident. She rode by SS officers without a second glance. After all, she had nothing to hide on those occasions. She and Annie shocked both the Wijmans with their sudden friendship, and Annie pleased her mother, although Lena knew that was no part of her intent, by playing more with Bennie and lifting a dishtowel now and again. She felt the glow too, it seemed, of a genuine connection with another human being.

Lena continued to regret leaving Sofie alone each time, but she grew used to her reproachful looks. After all, it wasn’t Lena’s fault that Sofie was living like a prisoner in the Wijmans’ house. In fact, it was thanks to Lena that Sofie had any place to stay at all.

Thursday came again. Annie handed over the envelope, and Lena made her announcement at lunch. A bicycle ride, despite
the drizzle. Bennie perked up immediately. He didn’t mind a bit of rain. And Vrouw Wijman didn’t even glance out the window. It was fine with her.

Lena had been tense all morning, despite her newfound confidence and her joy in last week’s ride. She knew that the risks were great, and that they extended beyond her to Sofie and the whole Wijman family, especially to the little boy who held up his arms with such excitement to be placed in his special seat. She pushed the tension aside. These risks were not taken without reason. This was how you helped people. This was what people did. It was a war.

I sound like Piet, she thought, and smiled.

The second ride was not as nice as the previous week’s because of the rain, but it was no more eventful. Lena arrived home ready to burst. Despite the mountains of potatoes and sugar beets that she had peeled and chopped, the hours scrubbing floors and looking after Bennie, she discovered that she had never felt truly useful before this day. Not once. She and Bennie practically danced into the house, drawing a grumpy comment from Vrouw Wijman, a sad look from Sofie, who was washing pots, and a warning look from Annie, who was in her customary posture at the kitchen table, hair in eyes, book in hand.