They usually ate fifteen minutes after Wim came home from the office. He had a job as a bookkeeper in a machine factory. In winter, after the time change, he left his office around five o’clock, but either way, summer or winter, they always ate at quarter after six. Both of them, after rather easygoing childhoods, had grown accustomed to doing everything as precisely and punctually as possible. Especially Marie. It gave life, which after all had so many changes and surprises in store, especially in times of war and foreign occupation, a certain fixed form that you could cling to when there was otherwise no shore in sight.
In March, when everything was back to normal again and Marie could breathe easy. Wim left the house at the usual time in the morning, and came home again at the usual time in the evening.
One night in April, Wim said in passing during the meaclass="underline" “So he’s coming today.”
“That’s good,” Marie said, and kept eating. They had made all the necessary preparations for his arrival. But they were both still tense and easily excited.
“A little more soup, Wim?”
“There’s more? Sure. But shouldn’t we set aside a plate? From now on you’ll have to cook bigger portions. There won’t be any more leftovers.”
“I’ll cook big enough portions,” Marie said as she handed him the soup, “that we can have hot leftovers the next day at lunch. There will be enough potatoes and porridge as long as there’s any at all.”
“Do you think he’ll eat a lot?”
“You usually get hungrier when you have nothing to do all day but sit and wait from one meal to the next.” She waited until he had finished his soup.
“Can we keep eating from the soup plates?” Marie said. She stood up to get the vegetables and potatoes from the kitchen.
“Yes, sure, you’ll have less to wash up.” She gathered up the spoons.
“Just bring the pot,” he called after her.
But she brought, as always, the dinner service with flowers around the edges, which included the deep plates. It was part of her dowry.
“What is he ever going to do with his time?” Wim said. “It’s horrible, it’s like self-inflicted prison! Maybe he’ll study something.”
“We go to the lending library too. And then there are our books. — But who knows if we could stand it,” Marie added.
Wim could see that she was already completely used to the thought of it. He still thought back often to their first conversation about it, after Jop — an office colleague who, he assumed, often handled such things — had asked whether Wim ever thought about fulfilling his “patriotic duty” and… “Patriotic duty,” Jop had said, and the concept, which had never made the slightest impression on Wim before, much less been able to move him toward any action, sounded new and full of meaning, now that the Netherlands had been conquered and occupied. Jop knew the people he approached: with one he talked about “a purely humane act,” with another it was about “Christian charity for the persecuted,” and to a third he spoke of “patriotic duty.” This was how he achieved his goal, the same in each case.
“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.