The Safekeep(9)
Uncle Karel came to collect Louis, Isabel, and Hendrik at the harbor. It was freezing. They stood there a long time, outside of the car, while a German soldier held their papers in a rough-gloved grip and asked many questions. Uncle answered them all jovially, smiling, nodding.
Mother remained in Amsterdam, could not come—only children were allowed to cross. A week into their stay, Isabel, eleven years old, wrote her mother a letter:
Dear Mother,
Louis wrote to you this week but I saw his letter and it was only just a few lines of very bad penmanship and I am worried you could not read it and it was boring. House is bigger much bigger than ours in Amsterdam and we all like it very much it has three floors and we are three, which means each of us can have a floor (Hendrik says he won’t mind sleeping in the kitchen where it’s warm. It gets very cold upstairs in the night yesterday they said on the radio the temperature was –1.3). Will you be here for Christmas? Louis says I shouldn’t tell you to come because it is not allowed yet but it would be very nice if you were here for Christmas. We have found a chest of toys in the attic and Uncle Karel says it was left there by Saint Nicholas for us to have. One of the toys is a stuffed toy of a hare, which I am allowed to keep. Someone has drawn a horse on the wall behind my wardrobe. I have been trying to keep a diary as the prime minister has instructed but I run out of things to say.
The house is like this (I write this as I walk so you see exactly): you walk inside and this here is the hallway where you hang your coat and then there is a stair and two doors (study to the right, drawing room to left). The drawing room has the biggest mirror above the mantelpiece and it makes everything look 2x. The dining room is here and then there is the kitchen for which you have to go down two stairs. The kitchen is old and has very high ceilings and smells like oil which I do not like but the fireplace is very big and that is where we keep the fire because Uncle Karel says there is only enough wood for one fire but it is not a nice room. I will leave it now. We have had dinner in the dining room every evening. We had potatoes, and cauliflower, and one time meat: a piece of meat each!
The garden goes around in a big circle. Everything snowed in the night. Louis says we will play badminton there in the spring if we are still here in the spring. When will you come? I have heard 5 planes today, and saw 1. Uncle Karel said last night my face was too rough for a little girl and that I should practice in the mirror to make it nicer so I won’t end up a sour maid. Hendrik cries every night and keeps us all up. Louis gets very angry with him but I do not. There’s a girl who lives on the farm down the road who came to the house to ask for food and I said I didn’t know where the food was and she said her father died because he went into the woods and was shot in the head by a German. I said, That’s terrible! I felt bad for not giving food. Now I don’t think anyone should go into the woods. I have chosen the best room for you. It is the biggest, and looks out two snow-covered firs which is your favorite tree which you have once told me I remember which is why I chose this room for you.
Write soon, come soon!
Your daughter (Isabel)
Her mother had kept this letter with all the other ones, and Isabel’s halted and confused attempt at a wartime diary, in the locked drawer of her secretary in her bedroom. Isabel found it a year after her mother’s passing. She was twenty-two, and it was summer, and she had badly sunburnt her shins that day, having dozed off on a lounge chair in the garden. She sat by the secretary, legs chafing on the grain of the carpet, and read each letter she and her siblings had sent her mother. Hendrik had mostly written rambling, single-page requests to come and be picked up; Louis dictated the literal events of the days of the week and fantasized about joining the army, flying a plane. She read a diary entry of her own, a Tuesday in October 1945: counted all the stairs in the house and there were sixty-four. Hendrik has locked himself up in the bathroom and won’t come out and it’s a great bother.
Isabel, seated on the ground, papers in hand, had locked her jaw so firmly that the joint of it got stuck in place and she had to wrench her own mouth open with her fingers.
The war was stored in her memory unclearly, all out of order. In 1939, on a Monday, her father fell down the stairs. On Friday he had a nosebleed in a three-piece suit and was dead before month’s end. Nineteen forty-three was the year popular Vera called her shit-breath Isa, and so the rest of the class began to call her shit-breath Isa, too. In 1941 Louis got a little train for his birthday, which had an engine and went around and around and around. Bombs fell on Rotterdam. Trucks rolled over the loose bricks of the Sarphatistraat, where she and her mother got their pickles. She went to school, she walked home. Bombs fell on Amsterdam.
Their years in the east following the war were louder: chaos at the train stations, hollow-faced people wandering the streets on bare feet. Craters that filled up with rainwater, bunkers shaded green with moss. People showing up at the driveway to their new house to ask for coal, for food. Once, one cold evening when Isabel was thirteen, they were having dinner and there came a loud knock on the door that wouldn’t stop. It was 1946 and the war was over but Isabel’s mother closed all the windows in a hurry and said Go upstairs, and Isabel and her brothers had to go upstairs while the food cooled on their plates. They watched from the bedroom window as outside an upset woman banged on their doors and windows and screamed and screamed. Her shouts were unintelligible, desperate. She had a young woman with her who did nothing, who stood to the side, arms crossed, head down. Isabel had asked Louis in a whisper—What do they want? And Louis, staring out the darkened window, had said simply: Our stuff. Once, a man went to his knees and began laughing uncontrollably in the middle of a shopping street. The police came to take him away. Isabel was inside a store, watching it happen. She was fifteen when she first heard about the camps. She and some classmates were waiting in a classroom for the teacher to show up, and one of the girls said: They treat us worse than Jews here, and one of the other girls said, God, I wish they’d gas us, at least that’d be a way out.