Hunger Journeys (33 page)

Almelo was alive with excitement far into the night. The noise was mostly joyful and now and again just a little scary. Lena quailed at the thought of venturing out into the dark, but it had to be done. The thought of Sofie alone in that shed appalled her.

The Wijmans, it seemed, were not big on celebration. They went to bed early, claiming exhaustion. Annie led the way up the stairs. Lena was already in Bennie’s room, telling him his favourite bedtime story. She left the softly snoring body, whispered goodnight through Annie’s doorway in what she hoped was a suggestive tone and made her way down to the kitchen. Earlier in the evening, under Vrouw Wijman’s instruction, she had moved her suitcase out of Annie’s room and back into the alcove. She had already bundled up the two spare blankets from the train, along with a skirt, blouse and sweater, and had thrust the bundle under the bed. Sofie still had Lena’s coat and scarf, and luckily, when they humiliated her up on that stage, they had not removed her shoes or stockings.

Lena got the bundle, pushed the curtain aside and started. There stood Annie, candle in hand. “I’ll get a basket for food,” she said. And Lena nodded.

For the next ten minutes, they worked almost without speaking.

Thus began a nightly routine. When she could, Lena visited Sofie during the day as well, but she brought little food at those times. At night, she and Annie packed only what would never be missed. They squirreled away bits of their meals into pockets, scooped bits of stew into jars, sliced scraps off loaves of bread. Any hint that food was disappearing would instantly reveal what they were up to; Sofie would be discovered, Lena would be turned out and they would be run out of town.

Lena could not imagine Sofie’s hours in that shed. She and Annie worked also at alleviating her boredom. They brought her books, one at a time, and paper and pencils. Lena never saw her write, but she imagined the love letters mounting into stacks, the writing smaller and smaller as Sofie tried to make full use of the bits of paper Lena brought her. And she hoped and prayed that Sofie would have the sense to stay put.

Thus two weeks passed.

“I could go for a walk,” Sofie said one day as Lena sat opposite her idling away a spare hour.

Lena jumped to her feet. “No, you could not,” she said, her voice almost a bark.

“I … I need to get out of here. I can’t—”

“You need no such thing!” Lena was shouting now. “It’s not safe. You know it’s not safe.”

“Easy for you, going to a nice warm house every day, and a bed.” Sofie’s voice dwindled, and she mumbled something that Lena did not understand.

Lena collapsed back onto the straw. “What?” she demanded.

“I need Uli,” Sofie said, her voice a whimper now.

“If it wasn’t for Uli, you would have the warm bed and the nice meals. If it wasn’t for Uli, the evil Klaassens would be your sweet new mummy and daddy!”

Sofie mumbled again. Then she looked up at Lena, opened her mouth and spoke. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

And that brought silence.

At last Lena said, “You are not. Or at least, you can’t be sure.”

“I’m pretty sure,” Sofie said. “I’m late, and I just feel it, you know?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t feel any of the normal things. No cramps, for one.”

Lena had no response to this news. It was too much. She just would not respond. She could not. She would not.

“I have to go,” she said.

“But, Lena.”

“I said I have to go. I’ll be back tonight. And NO WALKS!” With that, she strode out of the shed, almost tempted never to return.

She did return, of course, that very night, with Annie, although she did not share Sofie’s news, not then. They brought Sofie food and drink, chatted for a few minutes and made their way home. Annie commented on Lena’s silence, and Lena shrugged.

Back in the house, Annie whispered goodnight. Lena stood and listened to her quiet footsteps on the stairs. Then she pushed aside her curtain, stepped into her alcove and sat down on the bed. The air felt different in there somehow, she thought, and the bed was lower or something. She had no time to make sense
of these thoughts before her mind exploded in terror as a hand clamped down on her mouth.

“Do not make a sound,” Wijman said into her ear, and he removed his hand.

Instinct made Lena do as she was told, but she lunged off the bed, intent on escape, only to find that the grip on her mouth had shifted to an iron grip on her arm. She was yanked back to her spot on the bed, now with Wijman’s body right up against hers.

“So where are you keeping her?” he asked, again right into her ear.

Lena shrank into herself.

“I said, where are you keeping her?” he repeated, his voice sharp and breathy, his fingers twisting her forearm.

“I … I don’t know what you mean,” Lena said. Her voice shook, but she could not help that.

He let go of her arm and turned from her to light the candle beside the bed. She did not try to flee. Where could she go?

In the flickering light of the candle, he turned back to her. “You don’t have to tell me. In fact, I don’t even want to know.” He paused and she watched him, disgust and terror warring with that calm place inside her that was busily forming a plan. “I want something else,” he said.

“No,” she said. “You can’t. I can’t …”

“Yes,” he said, “you can. Either that or we’ll go together and get Sofie and turn her over to the authorities. I don’t know where you’ve got her, but I doubt she would prefer prison.”

Lena looked at him for a long moment. She let her shoulders drop. “All right,” she said, and she put her hands over her eyes and let out a small whimper of fear.

He reached for her.

“No, wait,” she said. “Let me …” She stood and began to unbutton her sweater, keeping her eyes downcast. From under her lashes, she saw him sink back onto the bed, his back against the wall, watching her. She undid another button.

Then she turned and shot from the alcove, across the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs, silent and fast. Behind her, Wijman grunted in surprise and anger, and she knew he was following, but once she was on the stairs, what could he do? She slid into Annie’s room and knelt beside her bed.

“I need to come back in with you,” she whispered to the sleeping girl, and Annie mumbled and moved over. Lena crawled in beside her. She listened then and heard his step on the stairs. The footsteps stopped outside Annie’s door, the door opened and Lena sensed him peering inside. After a moment, the figure in the doorway withdrew and the door closed.

“What happened?” Annie whispered, still not fully awake.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Lena said, then she shocked herself by falling asleep in minutes, Sofie’s pregnancy and Wijman’s lechery turning to the stuff of dreams.

Lena did not tell Annie what had happened, not in words. “I need to sleep with you again,” she whispered the next morning when they found themselves briefly alone in the kitchen.

Annie looked at her. “Did he hurt you?” she said at last.

Lena pushed up her sleeve and held out her arm.

“Only this,” she said, and they both gazed at the bruises his four fingers had left behind. She flipped her wrist, revealing the larger thumb-shaped mark on the other side of her arm.

Annie met her eyes. “It’s not safe for you here,” she said.

“I know, but we need to eat, Sofie and me. The war’s got to be over soon, everywhere. It’s got to.”

The smallest nod and Annie turned back to peeling potatoes. Vrouw Wijman was on her way down the hall, Bennie in tow.

Lena watched Wijman closely after that on the rare occasions when he was in the house, and she took roundabout routes to Sofie’s hiding place. He pushed past Lena roughly whenever he had the chance, muttering obscenities at her, but Vrouw Wijman, Lena noticed, was watching him too. Lena was pretty sure that his threat to turn Sofie in was words, nothing more.

With her pregnancy more certain every day, Sofie talked of nothing but Uli and the coming baby, alternating between enraptured imaginings of the family she would soon have and terror that Uli would come for her and be captured or leave without finding her.

Over and over again, Lena and Annie promised to be on the lookout, to bring him to her or her to him the instant he was spotted. Once, Lena ventured to suggest that he might not be able to come. “He could be a prisoner,” she said, “or he could have been sent far away. There’s still fighting in Germany, you know. And in the west,” she added, thinking once again of her own family.

Those words brought glares and fierce denials, all the fiercer for the knowledge in all their hearts that the baby’s father could well be dead.

“He loves me,” Sofie told Lena more times than she could count. “He will come.”

Lena had other things to think about. For her, liberation meant an end to her barely begun Resistance work. Annie took her out one day to meet the tall, thin man at the house in the country. Two Jewish families were there too, on their way back to what was left of their homes. They had benefited from her ration cards, she learned, and she felt pride and humility all mixed together. The matchbox, it turned out, had contained tiny rolled-up bits of paper with signals in code to be communicated by radio to Britain. If she had known that when the German officer was taking his cigarette, she was sure she would have fainted from fear, although she was glad to learn that the message was concealed under a false bottom in the box, which did contain matches.

She thought about Piet. Was he all right? Resistance work had to be more dangerous in Amsterdam. And freedom was so slow in coming to the west. She imagined the corpses piling higher every day. She imagined the German soldiers, cut off, angry. What might they be doing to people? She woke up from dreams of gunshots and bomb blasts. It was as if she were really hearing the guns and bombs, not dreaming them.

In late April, they heard of food drops near Amsterdam, and then, within two days of each other, the two dictators were dead, Mussolini shot in Milan and Hitler killed, many said by his own hand, in Berlin.

Five days after that, it came. The end. The war was over. Amsterdam was free.

Wijman showed little expression when he heard the news on the wireless. He had come home with the radio the day after Almelo’s liberation, so they heard daily reports of the progress of the war. Now, as joy blossomed in her heart, Lena observed
Wijman’s indifference. His own freedom was what had counted. And he already had that, or thought he did.

He looked at Lena across the table. “You’ll go,” he said.

She held his gaze. “Yes,” she said. “May I have a day to prepare?”

He frowned and looked at his wife.

“Come on, Father. You can’t just put her out on the street.” That was Annie.

“We can and we will,” said Vrouw Wijman. “But you have your day, girl. Beyond that, it’s up to you.”

“I will leave first thing tomorrow,” Lena said firmly, while her mind screamed, What about Sofie?