Waiting for the Violins (14 page)

At least lookouts were posted, to warn of approaching German soldiers or Belgian police. A graver problem was that her money was running out. And that was another reason to join the partisans; they provided an income, however modest.

She walked with her head down, hoping not to attract any attention. Passersby were simply vague shapes on the periphery of her vision, until she reached her own street, and then the sight brought her up short. A man came toward her, in a dark jacket, and on the left side a bright yellow image stood out like a scream. A six-pointed star with a cursive “J” in the middle.

How soon before the next step? For surely, a next step was inevitable. It wasn’t only Moishe’s partisans who whispered about the deportations. Labor roundups had been ongoing for a year now, first with cajoling and a promise of benefits, and then with coercion. One would have to be blind not to see the brutality or deaf not to hear the rumors.

No, in the absence of instructions from the SOE, she would stay connected with the Jewish partisans, in spite of the ad-hoc way in which they seemed to operate.

In the weeks since she’d joined them, she’d acted only as a courier with messages and documents, and had occasionally lent her Enfield .38 for robberies. The “armed” partisans were curiously unarmed, and Moishe’s ineptness seemed typical. Fortunately, they always returned the gun to her by the next day, usually without using it.

She understood that they didn’t quite trust her. She wasn’t one of them, after all, except in sympathy, but if she was going to use them to gain access to a wireless, she had to be more engaged.

With her black-market potatoes slung over her shoulder, she passed through the downstairs shop in her building and mounted the stairs. As she reached the first floor she heard Moishe’s voice behind the closed door. His visits were intermittent, usually on “business,” and she wanted to talk to him. She knocked and called her name through the door.

Aisik opened, and though he seemed preoccupied, he invited her in. Moishe stood behind him smoking his eternal cigarette, and Rywka sat at the table, the young Jackie standing between her knees. The toddler played with a dishtowel, chewing on one corner of it, but the adults’ faces showed more than the usual dread.

“What is it?” she asked.

Moishe blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “The Judenrat has sent out letters ordering people to assemble at Mechelen, for work in the East. They say those who report immediately and arrive first in the work camps will get the best jobs.”

“Nobody believes them, of course,” Aisik added. “We’ve heard too many stories.”

“People do send back postcards,” Rywka said hopefully, but her tone revealed she didn’t believe it herself.

“Postcards,” Moishe said contemptuously. “They mean nothing. Anyone will scribble a postcard if someone is pointing a gun at them. And Kuba got a postcard that said ‘Uncle Yitzak sends his love.’ Yitzak has been dead for two years.” He leaned on the windowsill. “And if it’s for work, why are they taking children?”

“What will you do?”

Moishe stared out the window, smoke curling around his head. “At some point they’ll have to go into hiding. Outside of the city some place where fewer Germans are poking around. I’m already living that way, in a room half the size of this.”

“Can you get false identity papers? And food coupons if you’re not registered?”

“Of course we can, the same way you do, but all that takes time. Everyone wants them now.”

Aisik picked up his son and nuzzled his hair. “The noose keeps getting tighter and tighter.”

“I’m sorry. I wish I could do something,” Antonia said, but her remark sounded hollow. She edged toward the door. “Let me know if there’s anything…” She fell silent before the magnitude of their dread and her impotence, and let herself out.

*

Antonia sliced the ham into strips and boiled them with two potatoes in her single pot on her single hot plate. She added the limp remains of her leek greens and stirred, staring down at the pathetic meal. She ate slowly but was still hungry when she finished.

She’d adjusted to the modest rationing at home that had started as soon as the war did and learned to live with little bacon, butter, and sugar, then meat and almost every other dairy product as well.

But in Belgium under occupation, things were much worse, and it was a mark of how miserable her diet had become that she missed the spare meals provided to her in the hospital. The British rationing had kept her trim, but in Belgium, she was slowly starving.

She cleared off the table and was about to change into pajamas when a quick rap on the door caused her to jump slightly. The voice outside said, “It’s Moishe, with a friend.”

She opened the door to him and another man. Stocky, wide-faced, faintly Slavic.

“This is Jakub. Kuba for short. He’s in charge of the cell I’m in. Kuba, this is Sophie. She’s the owner of the gun you used the other day.”

Kuba nodded a greeting and she nodded back. She didn’t offer them anything. In their shared privation, that social nicety had disappeared completely. She pulled the only two chairs in the room toward her bed and perched on the edge of it, making a little discussion space.

The two men sat down in front of her and Kuba began. “Welcome to our cause, Sophie, and thank you for your gun. We can’t trust the ones we get here. Too many of them sabotaged in the factories. Ironic, isn’t it?” He spoke with the same strong accent as Rywka. Polish, she decided.

“In our actions, we work in three-man detachments on orders from one person above. We collect funds, finance hidden families, move people around, and eliminate collaborators.”

“Mouchards?” she asked. She’d learned the term from Aisik.

“Not only those. The mouchards are Jews who inform on other Jews to curry favor with the Nazis. They deserve immediate execution. But whole factories of Jews also serve the Nazis. We put them out of business when we can.”

“I told Moishe I’m willing to help out, but I don’t know whether I’m ready to kill someone for you. I also answer to orders from a superior. I just can’t reach him without my wireless radio.”

“What happened to your wireless? And how did you end up here in the first place?”

“I parachuted in with it and a colleague. Unfortunately the plane was shot down, so I don’t even think the crew had time to drop it or even the other man. Judging by what I could see from the ground, everyone and everything was lost. After that, I was on the run.”

“Is there any chance they might have dropped it before crashing?”

“I don’t think so. The patrol that brought down the plane had to have seen any other parachutes. I gave it up as a lost cause.”

“Where did you land? Do you have the coordinates?”

“I can show them to you. It was near the village of Oudenaken.”

Kuba scratched his cheek. “That’s not far from Breedhout, where we have contacts. I can at least put out an inquiry.”

“We can clutch at that straw if you wish, but I’d also like to find out where other wireless radios might be. There’s got to be more than one in Brussels.”

“It’s more than a straw. If it dropped from the plane, or even if it crashed inside the plane, someone will know. And wherever it is, we might get our hands on it. In the meantime…”

“Yes?” She realized this was the reason for the visit.

“I need your pistol again,” Kuba announced. “You’ll have it back tomorrow, of course.”

“Yes, of course. Moishe knows I’m always willing to lend it.”

“I know. But this time we may have to use it to execute someone. We just want you to know.”

*

Lying in her bed that night, she ran the scene through her mind. “Execute,” Kuba had said. It was wartime, and she’d seen hundreds, if not thousands of men die, so the mention of death hadn’t kept her awake. She had just always thought of her own gun as a means of self-defense, and it troubled her to know it would be the instrument of an outright murder.

She thought of Major Woolrich and the teams back at Beaulieu. What would they think of her involvement in such a group? Was she doing the right thing, or was she endangering both herself and the SOE, in the event of her capture? What was Dora doing in France? Hobnobbing with handsome resistants in Paris, or was she too struggling alongside desperate men?

And the Comet Line? Was the mysterious de Jongh family a fiction the SOE had fallen for? She couldn’t even be sure the people in the Café Suèdoise were resisters, and seeing the café full of German officers, she now thought it unlikely. They were all ordinary Belgians—with the exception, perhaps, of a commanding woman with green eyes who lived in a château.

*

High summer seemed to slow events down and lend an air of lazy normality to the occupied city. But one night, a noise from the street below roused Antonia from sleep. Drawing her blanket around her shoulders, she stood by her open window and looked down onto the Rue Marché au Charbon. In the predawn grayness, she saw little but the occasional flash of an electric torch. Obviously the people downstairs wanted to escape notice.

She first thought it was thieves, but the truck she could just make out suggested otherwise. She opened her window a crack and heard sharp commands that she didn’t understand. “
Einsteigen, schnell
.” Her eyes slowly grew accustomed to the darkness, and she could see individual forms now. Two people climbing into the rear of the truck. Others were already there, but the image was too blurry for her to count. Something heavy—a suitcase perhaps—was thrown onto the truck bed with a thud, and then two people climbed up after it. The truck motor started and the truck pulled away, the quiet of the empty street belying that anything ominous had ever happened.

But she knew what had happened. She simply had no words for it. She crawled back into the cold bed, sick to her stomach, and couldn’t sleep. When she finally dozed, hours later, she dreamt of heaping sandbags against a rising flood. But for every sack she hefted onto the wall, another one washed away and the water kept rising.

*

She awoke in the morning to the sound of more quarreling and footsteps on the stairs on the floor below. Dressing hurriedly, she opened her door a crack and listened, but the language was unintelligible. Yiddish, she now realized, was the language most of the partisan group spoke among themselves, when they didn’t need French. She crept out onto the landing and saw the back of a familiar head. Moishe stood outside his brother Aisik’s door, and a strange woman was in the doorway just in front of him.

Antonia ventured a step farther, trying to make sense of the scene.

A baby blanket under his arm, Moishe backed up a pace to make room for the woman to pass him. As the stranger stepped out onto the landing, Antonia could see she held the two-year-old Jacques in her arms.

Antonia understood now and was appalled.

The woman began down the stairs, and Rywka, sobbing, tried to follow her, but Aisik gripped her by both shoulders and held her back.

The baby writhed and thrashed in the strange woman’s arms, screaming, “Maman! Maman!” His face was red, and his face glistened with tears and mucous. “Mamaaann!” He stretched out the last syllable, reaching out over the stranger’s shoulder and clenching his little fists. “Mamaaaann.”

Finally Moishe went after her and threw a small blanket over the baby to calm him. But the cries continued, muffled and heart-wrenching, as the woman disappeared down the stairs.

Antonia watched, aghast, as Aisik dragged the hysterical Rywka back into the apartment and closed the door. Moishe remained outside leaning against the opposite wall, panting.

“Good God, Moishe. What was that?”

He wiped his face on his sleeve as he came up the stairs. “Please, can I have a glass of water?”

She opened the door to her apartment and motioned him toward a chair. While he dropped down on it, she drew water from the tap and handed it to him.

He emptied the glass and took a long breath. “They had to do it. He’ll have a better chance now.”

“What do you mean, ‘a better chance’?” she asked, though she’d already pieced it together.

He laid his face in his hands for a moment. “There is a group. Belgians, of course. They hide the children…some place. I don’t know where. Later, a week or a month, they find someone who’ll keep them. It’s hard on the kids, some of them. They cry for days, but…” He didn’t finish.

“Who takes them?”

“Sometimes families, sometimes just an orphanage or convent. We have to pay them. A lot. But they make new birth certificates, baptize them, give them new names. Aisik and Rywka hope that after the war they can find him again.”

He went to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass. Behind him, Antonia muttered, half to herself, “He’s two and a half years old. He knows who he is, who his parents are.”

“He’ll forget. Eventually.”

“I suppose so.” She imagined the days and nights of desperate longing until his infant brain blurred the brutal separation with forgetfulness. She could think of nothing comforting to say, so she joined him at the window, looking down on the street.

The car was gone and so was the child, the light of Aisik and Rywka’s life. A Belgian policeman pedaled by on a bicycle. The street held all the signs of normalcy. But behind the windows of some of the houses people cowered, hungry and desperate. She looked directly at Moishe.

“So it’s started, then. The raids. I saw them taking people away last night.”

“Yes. Not enough Jews are volunteering for those ‘work places in the East.’” She could hear the quotation marks in his voice.

“How do they decide who to take? I mean, why only those two families?”

“That’s the decision of the Judenrat. Apparently they have a registry of all Jewish families, the ones who haven’t gone into hiding. A man named Holtzinger makes up a list every day of those who should go. He gives the addresses to the Gestapo, and they come around with their truck. Usually at night.”