Page 46

Fairfield, New Jersey

She reached for a cut glass dish on the second shelf, then pulled back and winced in pain, massaging her left shoulder. Idioot, she told herself. Wouldn’t you think, after all these years, you would know better!

She stepped on a stool, retrieved the dish, and filled it with homemade pickles, then glanced at the clock as she stowed it in the refrigerator next to a pitcher of iced tea.

From the yard, where her son, Thomas, was roasting chickens on a spit, she heard the lilting voices of his wife and Anneke’s sister, Klara.

They were busy cutting roses for the table, and as she turned to fill a vase with water, the door burst open and her daughter, Hannah, and her laughing gaggle of granddaughters and great grands bustled into the kitchen.

“Oma,” called the youngest, “they had s tamppot at the European Deli, not as good as your potatoes, of course, but we bought some anyway.”

“And stroopwaffels, ” said Hannah, also not as good as yours, but we can never have too many sweets.”

“I made six dozen speculaas ,” she started to protest, but her voice was drowned out by the sounds of seven women talking, laughing, unpacking bags of way too much food to fit in her crowded refrigerator .

She gave herself up to the noise and the bustle because she knew it was hopeless not to, but she heard it instantly when the front door opened at just after four, and Anneke called, “Oma, we’re here!”

“ Lieve god ,” she breathed, tears springing to her eyes as she rushed to the figures in the doorway. “Zoe… lieve god , I can’t believe it…”

Zoe fell into her arms. “Evi….”

The woman she hugged was stooped and smaller than she remembered, but she would have known her anywhere, Evi thought, hugging Zoe tight. The decades fell away and the short, white curls were once again a lively brown and the frail little figure robust.

Now, as Zoe began to pull back, she saw the tall, silver-haired man at her side.

“Evi,” Zoe said. “This is Anton - “

Zoe’s son, Evi guessed.

“Oma, where are your silver candlesticks?” Hilde called.

“And your large Delft platter - for the chickens?”

And just like that, the greetings were done, and the guests piled in, and chairs were unfolded, and platters of food were laid on the table and the house hummed with busy, laughing people.

“L’ Chaim,” they shouted as glasses were raised.

To life , Evi thought. Indeed . And it was not until the dishes were cleared and coffee and speculaas and stroopwaffel were on the table, and Zoe was deep in conversation with her daughters and their daughters, that she found herself facing the good-looking man who had stood at Zoe’s side in the doorway.

Early seventies , she guessed, about the same age as Thomas. Tall and dark-haired, with flecks of grey in his brows, and a pleasantly ruddy face.

“Anton, yes?” she smiled.

“Yes, Ma’am. Anton Kuyper.”

“Please, call me Evi. You are Zoe’s son , ja ?”

The pleasant face broke into a grin. “Oh, no, ma’am. Sorry for the confusion. I met Zoe – that is, Doctor Visser – in Amsterdam only a year ago. I was searching for connections to the Dutch Resistance in the Netherlands during World War Two.”

Evi cocked her head. “Really?”

“Yes…I’ve been trying to find out more about for my own beginnings, and Doctor Visser thought perhaps you could help.”

Her eyes widened. “And how is that?”

He leaned back in his chair, brows slightly furrowed, gave her a quick half-smile.

“Well…all I know about my birth, really, is that it was sometime late in 1944 – or perhaps early in 1945 – and that I was found by a fisherman, screaming my head off, on an old. abandoned barge somewhere off the coast of Rotterdam…”

Evi felt the blood drain from her face.

Now the man leaned forward, concern on his face. “Mrs. Reese – are you alright?”

Evi worked to find her voice. When she did, it was little more than a whisper. “ Lieve god …baby Jacob,” she whispered finally.

She sat forward, grasped both the man’s hands and looked into his earnest dark eyes.

“You are Jacob Rood,” her voice was soft. “Your name is Jacob Rood.”

Now the man sat perfectly still, his mouth falling open.

Evi took a shaky breath. “You were born to a Jewish mother sometime in the last week of January of 1945, I think. What I know from my own mother is that your mother died while hiding from the Germans, with you and other Jewish refugees, in one of the old limestone caves near Limburg…”

Evi became aware of a growing stillness in the room. But all she could see was the rapt face of Anton/Jacob. “My mother, who worked for the Dutch Resistance, rescued you and brought you home in that barge.”

The words spilled out of her. “You were no more than two or three weeks old, and amazingly robust in spite of being malnourished – but there was something wrong with your hip – or your leg. We thought you needed medical help… ”

The man who had been baby Jacob seemed to hang on every word.

She told him of Mam’s resolve to get him to Belgium, where she could be sure no doctor would report him to the Germans for being Jewish. “You had been circumcised, you see…”

He nodded.

“And so, we headed south in the barge, toward Belgium – a route my mother had navigated many times, ferrying Jewish escapees toward the border…”

Her voice broke as she told him of the Nazis ambushing the barge, murdering her mother in cold blood – and of her own very narrow escape.

“We could both have been killed that day by the Nazis,” she said. “In fact…I was certain you could not possibly have survived…”

“I would have died,” he said, sitting perfectly still, “if your mother hadn’t somehow concealed me – or if my father – I mean the man who found me and raised me - had not heard me wailing in that barge. He found me hidden in a small compartment beneath the controls…”

Anneke was the one to break the silence. “Oma,” she said. “You never talk about those days – how you and Opa escaped from Haarlem, or how you came to America….”

Evi covered her mouth with her hands, rocked slowly in her chair. Then she rose and left the room. When she returned, she held in her hands a blue knit cap, with a yellow butterfly on its side.

Zoe gasped when she saw it.

“This is all I have to remind me of that day,” she said softly. “My mother – my dear Mam, God rest her soul – made this for me on our last Christmas together. I wore it on the day Jacob and I left Haarlem…”

In the silence, Evi took a deep breath. “We left in a little motorboat on a chilly morning in March of 1945, hoping, foolishly perhaps, to make our way through the North Sea and into the English Channel…”

She felt the spring of grateful tears. “We were fortunate,” she said. “The seas were calm, and we were spotted and rescued by a British patrol boat somewhere in the Wadden sea on our second day out in the boat. ”

She felt every eye in the room fastened upon her.

“By the time liberation came, in May of that year, I was already in this very kitchen, learning to bake challah with my mother-in-law, Jacob’s mother – watching freedom come to the Netherlands on a tiny, black-and-white television screen.”

She looked over at her eldest son. “I was already pregnant with you, Thomas, and learning to live as an American…”

She paused and looked at her oldest friend. “And you, Zoe? You went home?”

Zoe nodded, slowly. “Thanks to your kindness, Kurt and I made it to Middleburg in your mother’s barge,” she said. “I could swear, Evi, that I caught a flash of your bright blue cap that day as we prepared to move out into the Spaarne…”

Evi’s hands flew to her face.

“In any case,” said Zoe, “My Resistance contacts were able to move us safely across the border to Belgium. We stayed in Antwerp until after the liberation. Then we returned to Haarlem. Kurt had been a construction engineer in in Germany, and he was eager to help rebuild the broken city. “

She leaned across the table to take Evi’s hand. “Your shoulder,” she looked around at the sea of rapt faces.

“Your Oma,” she said, “took a Nazi bullet in order to rescue my father from the Germans. Evi, tell me, behagen , that your shoulder healed properly.”

Evi shrugged. “For the most part. It hurts a bit when I reach over my head. But I told you then and I tell you now, I would do it again if I needed to…”

She leaned forward. “And Mila, Zoe? Do you know what happened to Mila?”

Zoe sighed. “She telephoned me after she and Pieter safely reached Brussels, shortly before Kurt and I left Haarlem. They were preparing to make a life in Belgium, she told me…”

A pause. “But not long afterward, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She died in August of 1948. She was not yet thirty. ”

Evi heard the collective intake of breath.

“Pieter endowed a scholarship in her name at the University of Amsterdam,” Zoe said. “The Mila Brouwer Woman of Bravery Scholarship…”

Evi nodded, deep in the grip of memory.

But by that time, Thomas had brought out a bottle of Jenever, the Dutch brew made from juniper berries, and they drank to the millions who died in Hitler’s war and toasted those who had survived, and the noise level increased, and Alette, her youngest great-granddaughter, named for the woman who had come to Evi’s aid on that terrible day off the coast of Rotterdam, asked to try on Oma’s blue cap.

...

It was after eleven, and she was bone tired, by the time Evi finally closed the door of her bedroom.

Zoe had been installed in Hannah’s old room, Anton Jacob Rood Kuyper in Thomas’s.

In the morning, they would breakfast at Hannah’s, then pay a visit the Holocaust memorial museum in New York City before seeing a musical on Broadway.

But for now, she needed to rest. She creamed her face, as hopeless a gesture as that was, she thought wryly, given the map of her astonishing life in her ninety-year-old wrinkles. She ran a brush through her silvery hair, changed into a nightgown and climbed into her bed.

She lay there for a moment, re-living every moment of the impossible, incredible evening, then sighed and turned onto her good right shoulder.

She leaned across the bed to touch the pillow where Jacob had rested next to her for more than forty years.

She closed her eyes and swore she could hear his voice, as clearly as if he were in the room.

“Good job,” she could hear him whisper in her ear. “Good job, Itty-Bitty…I love you. ”