Hunger Journeys (23 page)

“You’re a brave girl,” he said. “Too brave for your own good maybe, but good for all of us!”

For a moment, just a moment, Lena let herself snuggle into the crook of that arm. She let the sensation of Albert’s lips on her face sink right inside her through her skin. Then she thought again about what Albert had done. Come to think of it, many of
the men in the room had almost certainly done worse. And here she was, drinking beer with them. She shrank away from Albert. And the terrible word
collaborator
formed in her mind.

Sofie raised her fingers and made claws with them, sending everyone off again. Lena gazed around the table over her beer, trying (and failing) to reconcile these friendly, laughing men with their probable actions. And what did it mean that she could say such a wicked thing and the Führer’s minions could wrap themselves up in it like a blanket? Not hard to guess. Loyalty was thin, riddled with holes, held together by many, many threads of fear. And somehow at this table on this night for this moment, fear was absent.

Lena stood with Albert in the dark doorway. Uli and Sofie were gone. He had offered to walk her home, and she had accepted. Lena had circled the table to talk to her, to convince her not to do it, to urge her to make her own way home, but Sofie had laughed and pushed her away. “We’ll be careful,” she had said. “No one will see us. Besides, who knows when I’ll see him again?”

Lena wanted to say, “You won’t see him again. At least I hope you won’t. Ever.” But she kept silent. Moments later, Sofie waved goodbye to her across the table, and Uli said jovial goodbyes to everyone, accepting the nudges and winks with good grace. Even eagerly, Lena thought, disgusted.

She turned to Albert. “I must go too,” she said, “before they miss me. Before they find their door unlocked.” And he rose. “No,” she said, “I will go alone. It is safer.”

“Please,” he replied. Nothing else. Just that, and he followed her to the door. There they were in the darkness, with dozens
of blacked-out windows pressing down on them. It would only take one person to pull the blackout paper aside and peer out for one moment …

“Goodbye, Albert,” Lena said. “Thank you for all you have done for me.”

Albert’s face was hard to make out in the dark. He stood before her, his arms at his sides. Lena moved closer. Silent tears were carving two wet paths down his cheeks. “I love you,” he said. “I will return after the war. I will find you.”

“No,” Lena said. “You must not. You will find someone else.”

He stood still, silent, just the occasional rough-edged breath. Lena felt a warmth in her own chest, a prickle in the back of her nose. She shook her head sharply and coughed.

“I must go,” she said shortly. “I thank you. You are a good man, Albert.” She rose on her tiptoes, pressed her mouth to his for a heartbeat, only a heartbeat, turned away and launched herself down the street in a dead sprint.

In the first moment of her mad dash, she heard Albert call her name. In the next moments, she heard him take off in a run after her. Then she turned into the wide-open square and kept on running without looking back. Behind her, silence.

She skidded to a stop two doors away from the butcher shop and crept the rest of the way. Only at her own door did she look back. The street was empty. Gently, gently, she turned the doorknob. Quietly, quietly, she slipped inside. On her toes, she slid the bar across. Coat on the hook, shoes on the shelf, key turned in the lock, she tiptoed down the hall, past the stairway that led up to where the family slept. She peered up and froze. Sitting on a step, right at her eye level, was a dim shape that could only be Annie. It was too dark for their eyes to meet, but a long moment after Lena saw her, Annie rose, ghost-like, and
disappeared up the stairs. Lena heard the click of her bedroom door closing behind her.

Lena had to wait for a long time for her heart to stop pounding. Would Annie tell? she wondered. What if they learned where she had been, who she had been with? At last she walked on, through the living room and the kitchen, into the alcove, where she stripped to her slip, slithered out of her stockings and crawled between the sheets.

That narrow bed was a lonely place, it turned out, with nothing but a thin curtain separating it from a houseful of strangers. Lena thought of Albert briefly, of their last goodbye and her perilous journey home, but it was Bep’s small, warm body that she imagined curled up in her arms as she cried herself to sleep.

“I’ll need Lena with me in the morning,” Wijman said to his wife at the dinner table after Lena had been with them for three weeks or so.

Those weeks had passed in a blur of hard work, hurried meals and endless hours on the kitchen floor devising games to keep one small boy entertained. After two or three long nights, Lena began to fall asleep without weeping. She put Albert out of her mind altogether, and she brought Bep and Nynke to mind less and less. As for Sofie, one day she would visit, Lena was sure. In the meantime, she waited and watched, seeking the right moment to ask if they could send a food packet to Amsterdam.

Today, Wijman’s announcement took everyone by surprise. Lena looked up from her plate, caught Vrouw Wijman’s eye and looked back down. There had been panic and rage in her face.

“What do you want with her?” Vrouw Wijman’s voice said, fury barely contained in the words.

“I’m bringing in a cow. One of the last. We had her tucked away in a bit of a wood when they came last, so she’s not in their count. But we can’t expect the same luck next time. Might as well have her in our bellies.”

“What’s that got to do with our girl here?”

“I need her help,” he said briefly, his eyes resting casually on Lena herself.

Lena stared. Help. What did he mean by “help”? Wasn’t he talking about slaughtering a cow?

“You’ve never needed a girl’s help before,” Vrouw Wijman replied.

He turned his gaze to his wife, unruffled. “She’ll come with me out to Bert’s farm and help me bring the beast in. Bert’s got enough on his hands. And his boys are gone, like everyone else’s.”

“There’s another girl right here, if you notice,” Vrouw Wijman said, nodding her head toward their daughter. “And of no use to me, that one.”

Annie had been making faces at Bennie, causing him to giggle and spit out potatoes. She paused and looked up, her face a studied blank. “I won’t be available,” she said, and turned back to her brother.

Vrouw Wijman reached out and turned Bennie’s head back toward his own plate. “That food is for eating,” she hissed.

“It’s Lena I’ll be taking,” Wijman said shortly.

Vrouw Wijman nodded her head, once up, once down.

Lena turned her own attention back to her dinner, or tried to. Instead, in her mind, four black-and-white, mud-stained legs crumpled while she watched, helpless. Behind her in the image, a man loomed, his intentions unclear. She took another bite and chewed, swallowed, and another.

Everything happened fast the next morning—or night, really, as it was still dark, curfew not yet lifted, when Lena tiptoed from
the house once again, this time out the back door and this time under orders. She followed Wijman for about a quarter of an hour, but to the outskirts of town, not to the country, as she had expected.

“Where will we take the cow?” Lena asked at one point.

“Home, of course,” Wijman said without slowing his pace. “We butcher her in the shed.”

Lena stopped dead. The shed? He meant the lean-to attached to the house. He was going to kill the cow there? And what exactly did he mean by “we”? The bit of bread she had eaten for breakfast threatened to batter its way out of her stomach. She swallowed hard and set off at a jog to catch up.

Soon they turned off the dirt road and onto a track leading to a house that loomed suddenly out of the dark. Lena sensed that farmland lay behind the house, although she couldn’t be sure from the front, as the houses were lined up close. Wijman led her off to the right, where the narrow track squeezed between that house and the next, before ending at a large shed.

The cow was inside, in a stall so small that she could not have turned around, or got up again if she had lain down.

She shifted and let out a low sound—more a groan than a moo—as they entered, plunging into true blackness because Wijman would light no light. The shed was warm, heated by cow, and the smell almost knocked Lena right back out the door. Cow manure. Fresh, though, she thought. Then she started. Wijman’s hand was on her waist.

It rested there for a long moment, pressing against her through her coat. And then he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s you.” And the hand was gone.

We’ve moved from eyes to hands, Lena thought, and a flicker of fear rose in her and fell away.

Minutes later they were outside, leading the cow through the narrow passage between the houses. Wijman walked well in front, holding the rope. Lena walked backwards at first, as close to the creature’s head as she could, murmuring to her, stroking the side of her face.

“She must be silent,” Wijman had said. “There are soldiers about.”

Not our soldiers, Lena thought. Uli and Albert were long gone; Lena’s midnight sprint was a fading memory. For several days after that first night in Almelo, she had waited for someone to come forward to accuse her, someone who had seen her right out there in the street. But no one had. She had avoided going far from the Wijmans’ house for fear of running into a soldier who recognized her. And in all the weeks since, she had not been to see Sofie. She thought of her daily, but she did not go. Nor did Sofie appear at the Wijmans’ door. She was probably too busy lapping up the luxuries of life at the Klaassens’ to bother with an old friend.

“Shhh, cow. Shhh,” Lena whispered, stroking the silky skin near the cow’s ear. The creature tossed her head a little, but she made no sound except for her hoofs on the hard dirt. Lena imagined those same hoofs ringing on cobblestones and gave thanks for that dirt. The sky seemed a little paler now. It was easier to make their way. But still, the town was tucked up behind blackout paper or blackout boards or blackout curtains. It would have been a peaceful walk had it not been for the war, the impending death of the animal she cooed to as she walked, and Wijman’s eyes resting on her so casually the night before and that heavy hand pressing down on her waist just now.

The cow balked at the entrance to the lean-to. The floor of the room was a little higher than the ground outside. The
cow had to step up. And she refused. Wijman pulled on the rope and swore quietly. The cow pulled back and mooed, a long, low sound of discontent. Wijman stopped pulling. Man and girl froze. The cow looked around for a better place to go than into this room, perhaps a bite to eat.

Lena shook herself out of her trance. No one was coming. It was all right. She thought for a moment. “Can we make a ramp?” she asked. And yes, it turned out they could. The door was removed from its hinges, which made the opening wider, more welcoming. Once the door was laid on the ground, leading up and over the sill, they had only to bribe the cow with some fresh hay, and she was inside.

Wijman put the door back in place and began rummaging around on his work bench.

The cow stood and munched.

Lena backed toward the door that led into the kitchen.

Wijman found what he was looking for, turned and smiled slightly at the fear on Lena’s face. He was holding a large knife.

“I used to shoot them,” he said casually, “before the war. But that’s too noisy now. So I stun them and slit their throats.”

Lena averted her eyes from the huge animal, which did not know it was breathing its last, and said the only thing that came to her: “What about the blood?”

Wijman smiled again. “That, my dear, is where you come in. Oh, and the drain in the floor. In the end, there will be no blood.” He paused. “Consider yourself lucky. I hired a boy to help before. And there was a calf in there. He had to help me deal with that.”

Lena stared at him. A calf? It took her a moment to understand. When she did—he meant a baby calf inside the opened-up belly of the dead cow—she turned and fled, through the
door and into the warm, bright kitchen, where three pairs of eyes stared.