The Safekeep(74)

Eva calmed. She pulled away enough to look. “How you’d what?”

Isabel wanted to tighten her grip. She didn’t. She counted the seconds. She said, “I want to die at the thought of anything hurting you.”

Eva was so near. There was smoke on her breath, the coffee, the winter’s sleep, and the heat of her skin. She put her forehead to Isabel’s chin. “And what if that’s you?” she said. “The thing that hurts? What if—it’s who you are? What if it’s where you come from and—”

Isabel turned her face down: to be closer. To feel the words with the heat of her mouth.

Eva whispered, “What will you do then?”

Isabel’s hands under the wings of Eva’s shoulders. She could not answer. She could touch: Eva’s back, her face, the bruised skin under her eye. Eva leaned into it, leaned into her, and then went from her. Turned her back and stepped away—a hand to the table. The space was so small and they were still in touching distance. There was a wall right there. Eva could not walk away.

“Please leave,” Eva said.

Isabel grimaced. “Eva.”

“Leave,” Eva said. The scarf had fallen from her shoulders, and now she was only a tight line of a neck. Three holes in her jumper: two near the collar, one over her spine—in the middle, exactly so. She said, “You have to leave.”

The distant sound of the upstairs shop door opening and closing. A young child was being told to calm down in order to be lifted back in its pram. The child would not: it screamed and cried and said, No no no no no no!

The house was cold. The back of Isabel’s hand hurt. She opened her mouth for words, and no words could come. She stood there for a long while, lost, and then did as she was told. She left.



* * *



The house did not greet her. It kept its eyes turned from her, ashamed. She accepted it. She did not turn on the lights. Outside, the snow kept on falling. She took off her coat, lit a fire in the kitchen, and made herself small before it.



* * *



And then: one quiet and freezing morning Isabel went for a walk. The trees stood bare and skeletal and beautiful with their fingers all crystal and white. The frost had made everything a crunch, the pastures and the fields and the gravel paths. The canals had frozen over. Isabel tested one with her foot and found it solid, and then stood on it in wonder: a miracle, she thought, to stand so solidly on what could also engulf you.

The sun came up slow and blushing, a misty pink. In the distance, a farm where a few sheep were making do with frozen grass. Two looked up at her. She stood, and waited, and looked back.

She went back home. She banked the fire and let it warm her fingers back to life. The house was as empty as a house could get these days. Neelke had stopped coming. She and Bas had gone to city hall and had married on a drab Monday morning; the registration costs were lower on a Monday. On her last day with Isabel, Neelke had brought with her a list of names, of girls she knew from town who would make for good help; then Isabel had said, “Walk me through your tasks,” and Neelke had given her a look that said: It’s you who gives me my tasks.

Still, she did. They went from the kitchen to the living room, they considered the curtains and the duster and the oil that needed to be applied to the staircase railing. They went through the linens and the name of the washer who did the job in town, they went through the bathroom and the beds and the silver and the windows.

Isabel said, “It’s quite a lot, isn’t it.”

And Neelke, with a frown, said: “It’s a house.” She said, “There’s always a lot to do in a house.”

The list was still on the table where Neelke had left it. Isabel had looked at the names and had made a note to contact a few; she had meant to set up an interview and she had not. She would have to, eventually: the dust was collecting more quickly than she knew how to manage, the bathroom had grown into its mildew faster than she expected, and her dinners were always one of two things: cooked too soft or not cooked enough.

Her hands were sore these days.

The day began. She sat in the study and replied to Uncle Karel’s solicitor and then to one of Louis’s more practical letters, and then sent a word of thanks in response to a postcard from Neelke and Bas: they had gone up to one of the islands for a honeymoon holiday. A picture of a lighthouse. On the back it said, in Neelke’s self-conscious school scrawl: Hearty Greetings, Neelke & Bas

She went to town and sent out her mail and picked up the linen from the cleaner’s. She went by the grocer’s, she went by the cheese farmer, she turned onto the Schoutenstraat on her way to her car and came to a standstill. She had seen the synagogue before. She had seen it as she had seen most buildings in Zwolle: as places that were either there for her or not there for her. The post office, broad and surrounded by trees: for her. The bright cafés, the ones where women sat: for her. The church was for her, some stores were for her.

The synagogue, an undefined broad facade, had not been for her. With its red brick and inlaid windows and a wrought iron fence it sat like a bad taste, a bad memory of something old. She had walked by it before and had quickened her pace. She had tried not to think of it too much, she did not wonder at the people behind its doors—how many of them were left at all. The lettering above the windows looked frightening: she did not know what it meant, what it said. It could mean anything. She could not read it and it could mean anything.