Page 7

Evi had been sound asleep yesterday morning when the motor turned over and she was awakened by the movement of the barge.

It was not yet fully light, and Evi had guessed they were bound for Middleburg, where Mam would pass Herr Zeller into another pair of hands, then rummage through the marketplace for whatever she could find to purchase.

She hoped the old man would be safe.

This morning, she felt the familiar empty quiet, the hold vacant and Mam at work – and with school cancelled for Nazi troop maneuvers, the day stretched ahead of her.

She would take the laundry to the wasserette, she decided , and then, perhaps, bicycle to what was left of the book exchange and bring home something to read.

She ate one of Mam’s homemade oat crackers topped with a tiny dollop of what was left of the orange marmalade, then took up the laundry bag, swung out of the barge, and took her bicycle out of the shed.

Even dressed in a coat over a sweater, with a grey wool cap pulled low over her ears, she felt the wind bite her face.

She blew out air and saw her breath. It was going to be a cold winter, she could tell, perhaps even more snow than usual – just what they needed, with two hours of gas and power a day and no end in sight to the misery.

...

She found herself alone in the wasserette on that early Friday morning.

She was moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer when she heard the shattering of glass.

She spun around to see, through the open doorway, two SS officers reaching into the display window of the silversmith’s shop across the road .

Glass lay everywhere, heavy boots trampling over it as the Germans hauled out silver trays, candle sticks and whatever else they could grab from the showcase, stowing armfuls of the stuff into the trunk of a Mercedes Benz automobile emblazoned with the SS insignia.

Evi backed up against the row of dryers. The SS took whatever they wanted, she knew - and not only from the Jews. She and Mam knew people whose cars, even their homes, had been ‘ requisitioned’ with no recourse. But she had never witnessed anything as brazen as what she was seeing now.

She watched as a white-haired man in a denim apron slowly emerged from the shop. Before she could tell if there was a yellow star on his apron, the two intruders battered him to the ground and walked over him into the shop.

Eyes wide, breathing hard, Evi ducked behind the row of wash machines. What if they had seen her watching?

Her glance darted to the restroom door, a full twenty feet away, then to a door marked, ‘employees only’ not much closer to her. Paralyzed, debating whether to run or not, she heard the slamming of doors and a motor starting up and the screech of auto tearing away.

In the silence that followed, she felt her heartbeat slow. She huddled against a washer, unable to move until she heard the sounds of people gathering.

Slowly, she brought herself to her feet, peered over the washer, moved slowly toward the doorway. She saw a small crowd murmuring over the downed shop keeper, who lay pale and still on the sidewalk.

She could pick out the occasional word – politie… ambulance – but as she moved close enough to see blood pooling at the curb, she knew with grim certainty that it was far too late for either.

ZOE

It was a two-hour trip from Haarlem to Enschede, and never a guarantee that a bus or a train would run as scheduled.

But she had been promising her parents for months that she would try to come home for a visit, and with the pet kliniek closed on Sundays, and no pressing work to do for the Resistance, Zoe thought perhaps this was the day to make the effort.

She sat, sipping tea, in the only comfortable chair in her flat, an old broad-backed armchair covered in flowered chintz that Lotte Strobel had helped her lug up the stairs when she’d moved into the tiny studio.

“We have no need for it on the barge,” Lotte had assured her. “It is old, but I think you will find it comfortable – and you will do us a kindness to take some of these extra dishes and cooking pots that have plenty of life left in them.”

It was one of the things that had most surprised her when she had taken the job in Haarlem – the solidarity of the Resistance community, the way they looked after each other with the same intensity that they poured into fighting the Nazi scourge.

She took the last few sips of her tea and decided that yes, she would try to get to Enschede and get back to Haarlem before curfew.

She packed a bottle of water, a hard roll with a bit of gouda cheese – her reward for standing two hours in line with her ration card – into a canvas shoulder bag along with a photo of her with a beautiful English Spaniel, gifted to her by the Spaniel’s owner in lieu of payment.

Of late, some of the smarter women in Amsterdam had begun wearing trousers, Zoe knew.

She wished she had a pair now against the cold.

But she put on warm stockings and her trusty grey coat over a well-worn sweater and skirt, wrapped a red wool scarf around her neck, and headed out for the walk to the bus station.

...

In the depot, four SS guards with bored expressions surveyed the comings and goings.

But the rifles at their sides sent a chilling message, and most passengers kept their heads down as if they had no other business but to study the octagonal pattern of the grimy, black and white-tiled floor.

But to her relief, there was a bus to Enschede scheduled to leave in thirty minutes.

Zoe paid for her ticket and boarded the bus, surprised to find it nearly full. Scanning the rows of seats, she found one toward the back, next to a middle-aged woman who edged closer to the window and smiled at her as she sat.

“Do you have enough room?” the woman asked.

“Oh, yes, thank you. This is fine,” Zoe stuffed her bag underneath the seat in front of her.

“Do you live in Enschede?”

Zoe turned. “No. I am going to visit with my parents.”

“How nice!” the woman exclaimed. “A pretty girl and a devoted daughter. Your parents must be proud.”

Zoe smiled.

“You live in Haarlem, then…”

“Yes. I do.”

“My name is Fiona. It’s a Scottish name. My father was Scottish.”

Zoe nodded. “Zoe.”

“I came to Haarlem yesterday from Gronau to visit my sister,” Fiona said. “It’s difficult to live here, is it not – what with power only two hours a day?”

Gronau was in Germany, just over the border, where there was far less rationing, Zoe guessed. She looked straight ahead. “It is.”

“Not that there is much to cook here, in any case.”

What was she to say to that?

But her seatmate was relentless. “They are saying the power may be cut altogether. Have you heard?”

The prospect had hung over the city for weeks. “I hope not.”

A short pause, then Fiona leaned in. “But they say the Allies are getting close. My sister’s brother-in-law has a son in the Dutch Air Force. He told them as much, just this morning.”

That rumor, too, continued to pass from ear to ear, but there was little evidence on which to pin their hopes. “We can only pray he is right,” Zoe said, leaning back in her seat as the engine noise ramped up finally, and the bus lumbered out of the station.

...

Enschede, for all its distance from Amsterdam, had been bombed by the Germans a year earlier – a fright that had roiled Zoe’s stomach for days until she was able to contact her parents. But she saw little evidence of the destruction here on the walk from the bus depot to her parents’ house.

Patches of green defied the cold, and gable-roofed houses that had been there for generations wore an air of quiet resignation.

Everything seemed the same, and all of it somehow different, but Zoe found her smile growing wider with every step she took, and her mother’s happy cry when she came to the door filled her with unbridled joy.

“Henk, Henk,” her mother bellowed. “It’s Zoe. Zoe is here!”

Still basking in her mother’s embrace, Zoe felt her father’s arms come around them both. The three of them stood together in the narrow entryway until her father finally broke away.

“Food, Emma, food! The girl is wasting away! Look how skinny she is!”

Zoe laughed. “Not so much! And you, Papa. Are you well?’

His bald spot had widened, Zoe saw, and the paunch that had once lay over his belt buckle had all but disappeared – and her mother’s rounded cheeks now verged on hollow. But her eyes were bright and, altogether, they looked well. Zoe bubbled with an excitement that verged on tears.

She ate her mother’s spinach and potato pie, the vegetables harvested from their own garden, and relished every bite of the sausages her father had wrested from the butcher in exchange for a few machine tools.

“I thought the other night about Frau Didi –” she began.

Mam shook her head. “We have never heard a word. The house remains empty. ”

They ate in silence for a moment.

Zoe told them as little as possible about her work with the Resistance, and steered clear of making promises she could not keep about staying out of harm’s way.

She toured what was left of her parents’ winter garden, and accepted the sack of potatoes and beets that Papa packed for her with care. Sooner than she wished, before the sun set so that she could get home before curfew, there were aching goodbyes and more hugs and more kisses at the door.

...

The bus to Haarlem was not as full as it had been on the morning run.

She chose a seat midway down the aisle and hoped the companion seat would stay empty.

Love, fear, hope, despair – emotions she had worked so hard to control all day now bobbed and collided within her.

She wished for nothing more, in the two-hour ride home, than to close her eyes, perhaps nap for a bit, and try to recapture the calm she needed to do what she must do every day.