Postcards From No Man's Land

  Daan laughed. ‘An open book!’

  ‘Wherein men may read strange matters.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Shakespeare. Sorry. The Scottish play.’

  ‘The which?’

  ‘The one about the Scottish king. You know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. Why should I know?’

  ‘Can’t say the name.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘You’re not superstitious?’

  ‘No, not really. Just a theatrical tradition.’

  ‘Is that any different?’

  ‘If you name the play, you have to clap your hands and turn around three times to ward off bad luck.’

  ‘Klets!’

  ‘It’s true. I’ve been in this play. We put it on at school. I played Malcolm, the murdered king’s son. It’s a very boring part. Most of it was cut. Which is just as well, as I’m not much good as an actor. Anyway, people kept saying the name and we had terrible trouble.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘A broken leg one night, and a stabbing during the fight scene another night. That kind of trouble.’

  ‘Accidents.’

  ‘Maybe. It’s a pretty violent play, Macbeth, but still.’

  ‘Ah—Macbeth.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’

  ‘Now you want us to do the stupid business of clapping hands and turning round, I suppose?’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  They stood up, facing each other.

  ‘Krankzinnig!’

  ‘Better safe than sorry.’

  They clapped their hands and turned round three times before falling in to their seats again, giggling.

  Daan said, ‘I can’t believe I did that.’

  ‘A rationalist like you,’ Jacob said. ‘Ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Ridiculous.’

  ‘Puerile,’ Jacob added, rather because he liked the sound of the word than meaning it, and hoping Daan didn’t know he was laughing more as relief from social panic than from amusement.

  Daan went to the kitchen and opened a bottle of dry white. It was after six o’clock, the time every day, he said, when Geertrui had always done so and he had become accustomed. ‘The hour of the evening glass,’ he said she called it. ‘But this is only een goedkoop wijntje—you know—cheap stuff.’

  ‘Plonk.’

  ‘So I add some tonic. Make a spritzer. What about you?’

  ‘Whatever you’re having.’

  ‘Have you no mind of your own?’

  ‘Not about plonk. Or any sort of wine, come to that. Unlike you, I’m not accustomed.’

  ‘Then I’ll educate you.’

  ‘Corrupt me, you mean.’

  ‘Sometimes they’re the same, don’t you think?’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘You learn something, you aren’t innocent any more.’

  ‘If you put it that way.’

  ‘One way, another way, the result is the same.’

  ‘Won’t argue the point, if you don’t mind. Afterwards, maybe.’

  They settled themselves with their drinks. The room had darkened in the evening light. Daan switched on a side-light by the sofa, which islanded them in the gloaming. The heavy beams loomed overhead. It seemed to Jacob more than ever as if they were sitting between decks in an old sailing ship. A long way out from land and going where, he didn’t know.

  Their mood turned solemn again. Daan eyed Jacob with a calculating stare that propositioned the years between them. Feeling adrift again, Jacob stared back, the wine perhaps helping him to hold his own. Dutch courage, he thought unsmiling.

  At last Daan began. ‘This is it, then. Yes?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You know Geertrui is ill.’

  Jacob nodded.

  ‘But more than just ill. She has cancer of the stomach.’

  He paused, waiting for a response. Jacob could say nothing, only swallow, aware of his Adam’s apple rising and falling like a sharp stone plugging his throat and his stomach tightening as if infected by the words.

  ‘Incurable,’ Daan went on. ‘And very painful. Often more painful than is bearable. More and more often.’

  Jacob forced himself to say, ‘How awful.’

  ‘They do their best with drugs. But by now, it isn’t enough. Sometimes I think it’s like the pain eats the drugs, and gets worse, gets stronger from feeding on them.’

  Jacob had to put his glass down but managed to say, ‘Surely there’s something they can do?’

  Daan shook his head. ‘It’s in the terminal stage.’

  ‘You mean, she hasn’t much longer?’

  ‘A few weeks. But before the end the pain is—’ Daan took a deep breath as though he had felt a sudden twinge himself. ‘One of the doctors told me it’s worse than the worst torture.’

  Jacob tried to grasp what this meant, a pain beyond cruelty. But could find no clue to such horror in his own life. He said, for something had to be said, ‘And there really is nothing they can do?’

  ‘Niets. Nothing much.’ Daan turned his face away before adding, ‘Only one thing.’

  Instantly, Jacob knew what it was he was about to hear. His body stiffened against it, yet at the same time his strength seemed to drain out of him, leaving only a sensation of flabby weakness trapped in his rigid frame.

  Daan didn’t pause but continued at the unforgiving pace of someone required to speak the inevitable.

  ‘They can assist her death. And Geertrui wants it. Is to have it. It’s decided. You understand?’

  Jacob nodded. ‘Euthanasia.’ And added, ‘We debated it at school,’ thinking even as he spoke how banal it sounded.

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘Most people were against it. They said it was anti life. And that it would lead to people with power getting rid of anybody they didn’t want.’

  ‘Like Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.’

  ‘Yes. And not just them. Stalin was just as bad in his own way. Pol Pot. Now we live longer and there are more and more very old people. We keep on hearing about how much they cost to keep. Well, if euthanasia were allowed—’

  ‘We’ve had all those arguments here in Holland. And you, you agreed?’

  ‘About that, yes. But …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Some people argued that everybody should have the right to die decently. To make decisions about their own death. We didn’t ask to be born, they said, but at least we should have some say in our own death. Especially when we can’t, you know—function properly any more … It’s a question of personal freedom.’

  ‘And you? What do you think?’

  ‘I agree with that. About dying decently and having a say in how you die.’ He gave Daan a cold look. ‘But it’s easy to talk.’

  Daan drained his wine. ‘It’s allowed here so long as everything is done properly. The illness must be in the terminal stage and causing extreme pain. Geertrui’s is. Two doctors must agree. They have. An independent doctor must review the case on behalf of the authorities and agree. This has been done. The nearest relatives must be consulted and agree. We have. But it wasn’t easy. My father and I accept it. But Tessel was completely against. Nothing to do with reason. Emotionally. She just hates it. She and I—we had bad rows about it. We said terrible things to each other. She accused me of wanting Geertrui out of the way so I could get my hands on the money from selling this apartment, which Geertrui has left me in her will. I accused her of liking to see Geertrui suffering because of … well, because of some family history. I suppose at such times people do say unforgivable things to each other. We’ve made it up. But it still hurts. I think that’s why Tessel wanted to tell you all this herself. She wanted you to hear it her way. And also why she didn’t give you my address yesterday.’ He poured more wine and eased himself in his seat. ‘Well, anyhow, Tessel is the one who’s with Geertrui the most and has to cope with the suffering, which has worn her down. And Geertrui ar
gued and pleaded and went on and on till in the end Tessel had to accept that whatever she feels it’s what Geertrui wants that matters.’

  Silence. Jacob’s mouth was dry. Reaching for his drink, he had to steady the glass with both hands. The chill of the crisp liquid shocked his gullet and cut the heat of his stomach. He glanced at Daan, who was looking back at him from the sofa, watching. Piercing blue eyes, handsome, inquiring, probing. Time and again since they’d met Jacob had caught Daan observing him like this. Why? What was he searching for? Was there something he wanted?

  Jacob rubbed his damp brow with fingers still cool from his glass.

  ‘Nine days,’ Daan said. ‘The Monday after next.’

  The announcement hit Jacob like a blow in the face. He could say nothing, not even that he did not know what to say.

  Instead, tears, involuntary, unexpected, began to swamp his eyes till they brimmed over and trickled down his cheeks and dripped from his chin on to his chest. He made no effort to resist them or to wipe them away. He was not sobbing out loud or gasping for breath or snivelling or making any sound at all, and remained completely still in his chair, staring ahead in to the deep shadows that buried the other end of the long room. The familiar hated affliction—feeling awkward, foolish, inept, embarrassed—surged through him, but for once he did not care and paid it no attention. The mouse dream flitted through his mind. Then he thought of Anne Frank and of his visit to her house—no, not her house, her museum—that morning. And now this and these tears. All somehow connected.

  After a while, Daan said with quiet hardness, ‘Don’t cry for Geertrui. She wouldn’t want it.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Jacob said with a flash of insight that came as he spoke the words.

  ‘Why, then?’

  ‘Because I’m alive,’ Jacob said.

  GEERTRUI

  I STILL REGRET that Dirk killed the German soldier. As we struggled in the dark through the village, from house to house, from street to street, and from tree to tree across the park behind the Hartenstein Hotel, buffeted all the time by the thunderous bombardment of the British guns shelling the German positions, and soaked by the icy rain, I prayed—for I still prayed in those days—that no one would be killed. Not my brother Henk, not our friend Dirk, not our British ally Jacob, not myself, but not a German soldier either. There had been enough killing. I hated so much the evil of it all. It was as if a poison had risen in us and was ravening our souls.

  We had almost escaped when it happened. Henk and Dirk had been friends since they were small children. They had played everywhere in this area and had walked and bicycled to each other’s houses many times by many different routes. They knew every millimetre of the ground between. That is why we felt so confident that we could find our way at night and in such dreadful weather, and avoid the Germans, who we knew were only sparsely dug in in the wooded area along the western perimeter between them and the British. We thought we had succeeded, were just beginning to relax, when there he was in front of us, suddenly rising out of the earth.

  I do not think he had seen us. I think he stood up, perhaps only to ease his aching limbs or rearrange himself in his uncomfortable slit-trench. Whatever it was, I think he was more surprised by us than we were by him. And this is what saved us. For luckily he hesitated a moment. Jacob was holding his gun ready to fire, as he had since we set out. But an hour or more of sitting on our garden trolley in the cold and rain had stiffened his already weak body. He did manage to point the gun, but his fingers were so frozen that he fumbled when he tried to fire. As he did so, the German came to his senses and raised his weapon. At that moment Henk let go of the trolley and flung himself at me, pushing me to the ground and falling over me, meaning to protect me. So I did not see what happened next, only heard the shooting of Jacob’s gun. When it was over I learned that as Henk flung himself upon me, Dirk grabbed the gun from Jacob, pointed it and pulled the trigger, hitting the German in the face and killing him at once. A farmer’s son, Dirk was used to handling a shotgun, but he had never used anything like Jacob’s British sub-machine gun. What he did, he did in the heat of the moment, by instinct. Just as it was Henk’s brotherly instinct to push me to the ground and protect me with his own body. We were lucky that the German had not spotted us before he stood up, we were lucky that he hesitated, we were lucky that Dirk moved so quickly, we were lucky that Jacob’s gun was ready to fire, and we were lucky that the gun’s mechanism worked properly despite the conditions. As so often at such times, especially in war, the outcome depended on luck. Not on heroism, if heroism depends on rational thought, for there was no time for thought. Only on the irrational, arbitrary, unjust nature of luck.

  To me it seemed that in the same instant that Henk pushed me to the ground he was pulling me to my feet again, and we were scurrying as fast as the trolley would allow through the trees and away from the gunfire and exploding shells and the dead German soldier and away from any of his comrades who might have been hugging the earth for dear life in their trenches nearby. As it was the shells of our allies which were making them keep their heads down, I suppose another piece of luck was that we were not killed by what military politicians nowadays so wittily call ‘friendly fire’. (Will there never be an end to the cynical misuse of language by those who rule us.)

  When at last we reached the farm at about three o’clock that morning, our reception by Mr and Mrs Wesseling was not as warmhearted as we might have hoped. Of course they were glad to see their son and to know that he was alive and unharmed. But they had not wanted him to run off and help the British in the first place and, I’m sorry to say, blamed Henk, because they believed he had persuaded Dirk to do it against their wishes. To be fair, I cannot blame them. Dirk was their only child. His mother was beside herself at the thought of losing him. Now he had returned from what his father called his ‘pigheaded prank’ in the middle of the night, bringing with him not only the friend who was in their bad books and the friend’s sister, but also a wounded British soldier who could not look after himself and whose presence was a death warrant with all our names on it if the Germans found him with us. In the circumstances, we could not expect them to be overjoyed at our arrival.

  Jacob was in a poor state, almost unconscious and in great pain. We got him inside and cleaned him up and changed his sodden clothes for some of Dirk’s, which fitted him well because they were alike in size. After that, Henk and Dirk and I cleaned ourselves and changed in to dry things. Nothing much was said while this was going on. The Wesselings were good, practical country people who disliked upsets and displays of emotion and who responded to such a crisis with calm efficiency, doing what had to be done to restore life to everyday normality and order, whatever their thoughts and feelings about the difficulties we had inflicted upon them.

  As soon as we were all ready, Mr and Mrs Wesseling took Dirk and Henk with some food in to the parlour to discuss the situation, leaving me to tend to Jacob. Together we sat by the kitchen range eating wonderfully fresh bread, and pea soup which I fed to him because his hands were still not adept enough to handle a spoon. After the deprivations of the previous days this seemed like heaven. Heaven to be warm and dry again, heaven to feel well fed again, heaven to be out of danger and away from the noise of guns and bursting shells, heaven to be in a clean, well-ordered home with its comforting sights and sounds and smells. But not a heaven I could completely enjoy. For I thought of Mother and Father still trapped in the hell we had just escaped, with unknown perils still to face once the British retreat left them exposed to the Germans’ wrath. I prayed for them as I sat back in my chair and stared in to the fire.

  Which is the last thing I remember before being woken by Henk hours later. Heaven had proved too much for me. After days of weariness and anxiety which I had not allowed myself to give in to, food, warmth, safety, and the comforting silence had sent me to sleep, a sleep so sound and deep that I had not heard the Wesselings and Henk return to the kitchen, where they had found Jacob as well as m
yself dead to the world, and had decided it was best to leave us where we were till morning. Mr and Mrs Wesseling had retired to bed. Through the rest of the night first Dirk, and then Henk, had kept watch from upstairs windows for any sign of approaching Germans. Only when the family was getting ready for the day’s work did Henk wake me with coffee, and quietly tell me what had been decided.

  You will not know what a Dutch farmhouse was like in those days, so I must explain you, if you are to understand how we lived and what happened the next few weeks.

  Like most of our farmhouses, the Wesselings’ had a large cowhouse attached to it. Both buildings had their own entrances, but you could get from one in to the other on the inside by a connecting door in the dairy, which was convenient for bringing in the milk. The cowhouse was big enough for twenty or more cows, in two rows along the sides, each with its own standing-place, head to a manger, tail over a gutter for the manure, and an aisle between the rows wide enough for a hay cart, which entered the shed by big double doors in the end of the building. Above the cows, under the arch of the roof, a gallery ran all round, where hay and unused equipment were stored. The gallery was reached by a ladder, which, at the Wesselings’, was tied by its top rung to one end of the gallery. From its lowest rung a rope went up through a pulley attached to a crossbeam in the roof, by which the ladder was swung up in to the roof, out of the way, when not in use.

  During their time ‘underground’ before the British arrived Dirk and Henk had built a hiding place in one corner of the gallery. First they erected walls made of wood from old boxes. Then they stacked bales of hay in front of the walls and piled loose hay over the bales. In the other corners they made similar stacks of hay, so that all looked very much the same. To enter their hiding place you forked loose hay from the bales and had to know exactly which bales to pull away to reveal the gap in the wooden walls. If you knew what to do, getting in and out was quick and easy. Of course, the Germans expected people to hide in hay. But unless they were very suspicious or had been tipped off, they only poked about with a hay fork or a bayonet and rarely took the time to dismantle a whole stack. It was too much trouble—and hard work.