“I’ll talk to Marie, Jop. I’m not opposed to taking someone in. We have enough room.”
“Almost everyone is doing it,” Jop said, to strengthen his resolve. He knew that it was up to the wives. They sat home all day with their guests and had to do most of the work. “A man or a woman, I have to know that too.”
“Okay, Jop.”
At first Marie hesitated. “Not because I have anything against Jews,” she had said. “But to involve yourself so intimately with a stranger’s fate, spend all that time under the same roof for who knows how long—you
know that’s not how I do things.” She was speaking the truth. It corresponded to the shape of her body: medium height, thin, almost youthful, with something cold and dry about it. Only where she loved was there a resonance of deeper feelings, and then she could overcome all sorts of resistance. It was in her nature to make all her objections up front, at the start. This made her a bit slow to take action, but it saved her all sorts of reproaches and resentments after the fact.
Wim was silent. He thought it was a good thing that she was reluctant. They had known each other for around seven years now—he was nineteen when they met and she was twenty-one—and they had been married for three years. She had her own view of things, which was entirely independent and often contradicted his, and she had expressed it in a calm, firm voice. He loved this about her.
“Maybe I’m being selfish, but I don’t like this kind of thing. Besides, it’s too serious a decision to make lightly.”
“Jop says it’s a patriotic duty.”
She laughed. He had never spoken like that in his life. But when she saw that he meant it seriously, she stopped.
Wim said: “It’s the only way we can fight back, the only way we can do anything at all to show that it isn’t all right. Civil disobedience.”
She thought about the young men who had died in battle, about the five days of the invasion, about Rotterdam
and much more. The decision slowly ripened inside her.
“Obviously,” she replied, “a refugee like this is not a source of income, at least not for us.” She had heard that unbelievably high prices were often offered, and often demanded too.
The next day, after she decided on her preconditions, she agreed. “A man of course. I’ll give him the front room upstairs. It’s roomy and bright, and if you have to spend the whole day in it . . . What do you think? . . . He doesn’t need to stare at the curtain all day. He will definitely have to stay away from the window, I mean . . . Well, we’ll see . . . And in the distance there’s the ocean, you can see it in the shape of the clouds and in the morning air, it’ll be some distraction . . . What do you think?”
It sounded good to Wim.
Jop brought the stranger at night, in the dark, a little before eleven. Marie let them in and Jop quickly said goodbye; he had to be home by eleven, because of the curfew. “Say hello to Wim, I’ll come by tomorrow and check in.”
The stranger stood in the front hall. He was wearing his hat pulled far down over his face and had a medium-sized satchel in his left hand and a black leather briefcase under his arm. Marie opened the first door on the right, to the front room. All the lights were off. Through the open sliding door, the lights shone in from the back room, where Wim sat busy with some work at
the table. Books and notebooks were scattered on the dark brown tablecloth. A teacup sat nearby. The thin, fragrant smoke of a little wood fire fed with peat hung in the room.
When Marie had opened the door for him, he had mechanically, hesitantly walked through the half-dark front room. Marie shut the door behind him. When he saw Wim sitting there, he stopped in the frame of the sliding door, at the threshold to the back room. Only now did he seem to remember that he was inside. He slowly took off his hat.
Wim had stood up and meticulously tightened the cap on his fountain pen, then put it in the upper left pocket of his vest. He saw how the stranger, with an almost unnoticeable motion of his head, had let his gaze stray a little to the right, to the stove. He thought he saw the man’s nostrils tighten and then relax again from breathing in the delicate wood- and peat smoke. He wore a winter coat and seemed to be hot from running through the city. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, and his face—dark-complexioned, with little wrinkles around the mouth, and eyes carved deep into his otherwise firm, clean-shaven skin—glittered in the light. His large, dark, somewhat melancholy eyes looked feverish and flickering. His hair was thick and smooth, low over his forehead. A Spanish type! Wim could see that the stranger was older than he was; around forty, he guessed.
“Please come in,” Wim said. Nothing else occurred to him besides this everyday phrase. At the same time he invited the man to come closer with a nod of his head.
The stranger stepped silently over the threshold. He carried his suitcase and briefcase as though he were used to keeping them with him. He had his hat in his left hand as well.
Wim took a few steps toward him, stretched out his right hand, and said quietly, as was his habit, “Welcome.”
The stranger gripped his hand. They stood close together, both about the same height. “Thank you,” the guest said.
Later he let Marie take his coat and hat, so that she could hang them in the front hall, and let Wim set his suitcase and briefcase in a corner. But suddenly he said, in a bright voice, “Perhaps it’s better if the coat and hat stay in here for now. I’ll bring them along to my room later.” Marie turned around in the doorway and looked, embarrassed, at the men.
“That is better,” Wim confirmed, and laughed a friendly laugh at her. Turning back to the other man: “You’re right. We still have to learn how it’s done.” Now Marie laughed too. She put the man’s things on a chair and fetched some tea.
The conversation was halting. Finally, the stranger, his eyes looking calmer and less feverish, began: “It all happened so fast, Jop had to leave right away.”
So he called him “Jop” too. Wim made a mental note.
“He had to get back home on time,” the other man went on.
Wim gradually regained his usual composure. Even if he was the younger man here, he was still the host, and that brought with it various responsibilities. He felt that the other man had understood precisely the reasons for Wim’s initial discomfort and that he had made an effort to dispel it, even though he found himself in an even less comfortable situation. Wim offered him a cigarette and said, as he lit the match, “My wife and I are happy we can do something for you.”
Marie nodded at his words and slowly exhaled the smoke of her cigarette through her nose. She too had fully recovered her poise. Their first encounter had been so confused—the stranger was right, everything happened so fast, Jop had to get home on time. They had needed to make their way slowly back into the trusted port of a safe, well-known conventionality.
The stranger swept his hand over his hair. He could not yet believe he was safe here.
“The conditions in which we find ourselves together here,” Wim started up again, “are not exactly of a sociable nature. The purpose of our being together isn’t either. We will go through it together, but still, I would like to know your name . . . You must know our names already, yes?”
“In the dark I couldn’t read it,” the stranger answered, and he seemed a little embarrassed.
They were shocked. “Jop didn’t tell you our names?” Wim said. What could that mean?
“No—” he replied, “and it was better that way. Something could have happened on the way here, after all. It’s always better if you don’t know too much. You have to be careful to the end.”
Here he paused for a moment, looked at Marie and Wim, and then said, hesitantly, “So I hope you will permit me to . . . ach, let’s use first names, you can call me Nico.”
Marie found this surprising, abrupt, even a little rash.
But Wim said, “That makes sense, Nico”—and he extended his hand to him across the table—“That makes sense. In the end we won’t be able to stand on ceremony here for long. We have to live together. My name is Wim, and this is Marie.”
Marie shook hands with him too.
Then she poured him another cup of tea.
“We also have a place for you to hide, Nico, in your room.”
A light shone across his face. All the little wrinkles were lively when he laughed. He timidly began to realize his good fortune.
“We’ll show you tomorrow. It’s a little complicated—it’s too late tonight.”
“Good, Wim, that sounds good.”
“Tonight there’s nothing you need to worry about. No one’s looking for you here.”
“I’m not scared, Wim.”
“If we’re a little bit clever, and careful, then you can stay here and there’ll be nothing for you to worry about.”
“I hope that I’m not causing any difficulties for you—for you and Marie. I don’t know how long it’s still going to last.”
“No one does, Nico. For your sake, I hope it won’t be too much longer.” Wim stood up. “I think we’ll go—”
“Not just for my sake,” Nico interjected, and grew serious. Now it was clear that he was much older than Wim . . . “There are so many, so many . . .” It sounded like the simple, honest truth.
Wim hesitated. He understood Nico’s tone well. “You’re right—for everyone who’s in your situation, here or wherever—”
“And it’s not just Jews,” Nico added. He stood up. He had said what needed to be said!
“That’s true too,” Wim answered. “Now I’ll show you your room.”
“Good night, Marie.”
“Sleep well, Nico, your first night here . . .”
“What time should I get up in the morning?”
“Yes, when?”—now she hesitated and then smiled a little, with compassion. “Well, you have time. I’ll bring your tea up to you.”
“Thank you.”
Carrying all the things, the two men went upstairs.
Another hour and a half to go!
Wim sat downstairs in the back room as usual. He had shut the sliding doors to the other room. Books and notebooks lay spread out on the table in front of him; he was preparing for an exam, and had been for a long time, so that he could get a higher and better-paid position. At the moment he was taking a break. He had turned his chair a little toward the stove and he had a newspaper on his knee to hold the tobacco for the cigarette he was rolling.
Marie stood in the kitchen and did the washing. She had fetched the underwear, stockings, and other things out of the laundry basket, even though it was so late at night. Whenever it was a question of regaining her inner calm and equilibrium, she did laundry and cleaned the house. Wim knew that. Tomorrow it would be the upstairs room’s turn. After all, a dead man had lain there.
Tomorrow, maybe early in the morning, the police would find him too. That is how he would eventually get a proper burial. Later, if someone asked—but who, in God’s name! he had no one left!—they could dig him up again and give him a gravestone with his real name. In a moment of familiarity and trust he had revealed it: Bram Cohen, born ———, died ———. For them he had been Nico.
“I want to live to see the end, Wim. What do you think?”
“Why wouldn’t you, Nico?” It was long before his illness. “We all want that. And if we don’t get a bomb on our roof before then . . .”
In fact, he hadn’t meant anything with his reference to bombs. It was a kind of cosmic resignation.
“Do you think they’ll still come?” —“They” were the others, on the other side of the Channel. The invasion! He was counting on it!
Wim stuck out his lower lip, raised his eyebrows, pulled his head a little way back into his neck so that his shoulders stuck out more sharply—a face that expressed everything going on inside him: I don’t know, Nico . . . (Obviously, who could pretend to know with any certainty) . . . I don’t really think so . . . (Better not to count on it, so that you could only be pleasantly surprised) . . . but I hope so . . . (That would finally, finally mean the end of this sh–—) . . .
“It’s too late now, Wim. —Isn’t it too late for a lot of people?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” Wim had to agree. It was enough to make you lose your patience.
Silence.
Nico sank back into his thoughts. He looked old and gray then, a tired little bird, not at all like a traveling perfume salesman. He got too little fresh air. The few short walks in the evening, in the dark of the new moon . . . He wore old worn-out clothing meant for around the house, just something thrown together, green-gray pants, a blue shirt, mends and patches everywhere on the elbows and knees. He usually didn’t put on a tie. By evening his beard had visibly grown back. At first he had shaved twice a day.
“It’s lucky my parents were already dead.”
“Yes, Nico, that is lucky for them.”
“For me too. What would I have done?” After a little while: “They carried off old people, in cattle cars, the elderly, the sick . . . That’s not just a story.”
Wim knew that too. That is why he was careful not to discuss too fully things that were known only too well. It was dangerous.
“Cigarette, Nico?”
“Thanks.”
Light.
“Thank you, Wim.”
The first few draws in silence. Then: “This is good tobacco. Where can you still get it?”
And Wim told him the story of the tobacco: “Dutch grown,” he said with a grin, “smuggled to Belgium, fermented
there and perfumed up with some sort of juice, then smuggled back.”
For a little while Nico’s thoughts rambled along the Belgian border. He leaned back in his chair while Wim went on telling him about it.
“Whole fortunes cross over the border like that. If the two of us had even half of one of them, Nico . . .”
“What then, Wim, what then?” He would gladly give up his share if that would make the war end tomorrow.
“Last week I talked to a businessman friend from Eindhoven,” Wim said, and lit another cigarette. “You wouldn’t believe what crosses the border—from illegal people to illegal herds of sheep—everything, everything is transported there and back again.”
“In the last war it was exactly the same.”
“I wouldn’t know that.”
“But I can still remember, my father told me about it one time.”
“My father,” he had said. It sounded so strange coming out of his mouth. It meant at the same time his father’s father too, and his father before him, as if someone had accidentally struck a bell and all the other bells began to resonate with it, the bells that over the course of many generations had been cast from the same metal, all the way back to the beginning.