“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.
He took a few puffs and contemplatively exhaled into the smoky room. Two, three cigarettes like this in a single evening — what a luxury!
“And if they get caught, Wim?”
“With a herd of sheep they’d lose twenty, thirty thousand guilders. But the next transport makes it up again.”
“And for people, when they get caught?”
“It depends whether it’s pilots from English planes that were shot down…”
“What? That happens too?”
“Of course, Nico. Then they travel disguised as mutes, as a transport of mutes for labor deployment.”
They had to laugh when they pictured it: these young, strapping men, a deaf-mute labor deployment!
“And the others?”
“That seems to be well organized too. Anyone who gets across is saved. Belgium is only under military control, there’s not a civilian governor like here.”
“Are you saying you think I should try it too—?” Nico said suddenly, because he had recently gotten a piece of paper that proved that he was such and such a person. False papers, of course, but still, if you didn’t hold it right under the quartz lamp… But why, in truth, was he asking? It was his quiet fear. He was always afraid that one day Wim wouldn’t answer right away, that he would act like he was thinking it over and then calmly, apparently objectively, say, “That’s something you’d have to consider very carefully.” He almost expected it. So now and then Nico prodded him with a little test. The feeling came over him like some sort of feverish illness that he was a burden, that the others had had enough of him and wanted to be rid of him at last. Even though no one had ever given him the least indication of such a thing, these imagined thoughts of the others held him in their grip: “If we didn’t have him here, we could…” Or: “Well, we have one too… it’s not so simple. And it’s dangerous too…” Or… It is like a sickness affecting the thoughts of people in hiding, it destroys their naturalness and makes them rude or weak. Few are left unaffected.
But Wim interrupted him: “No, Nico, it’s better that you not stick your nose out into the daylight.” With all the strict checkpoints! There’s a four-hour train ride before you get to the border. Besides, anyone could tell just by looking at him. “I wouldn’t take the chance.”
Had Nico even heard? Yes, yes, but his thoughts were already racing further. They rode with the trains heading east with no stops, they ran through the camps, those whorehouses of death, slipped into the cells and chambers, saw all the way to the end, to the—
And then he said: “They better be quick about it, Wim, or it’ll be too late for us too.”
This was the deepest point that he could reach. And he reached it often — only too often.
“Ach, Nico,” Wim said, and leaned back in his chair. At the same moment he wished he were sixty and the other man forty. Then it would have been easier. But even so he couldn’t have kept it from ending like this—
It was so cold at night. Wim threw wood and peat into the stove, and together they gave off a pleasant warmth that quickly grew stronger. And that delicate, spicy smoke.
Marie appeared in the doorway. She had pushed it open with her elbow and was drying her wet hands on a kitchen towel. Her face shone with effort and her eyes were still red.
“Wim, I was thinking—”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking — maybe you’ll think, Why is she mentioning this now?”
“What are you thinking? Just say it… Come on, sit down.”
“No. I’m not finished in the kitchen yet… What’ll happen with his things?”
“What kind of things?”
“You know, Nico’s — his clothes, his underwear—”
Wim gave out a short, pitying laugh. “Well, he didn’t have much.”
“No, not much. Should I wash them tomorrow? Or…”
“Yes, just wait until tomorrow.”
“Coba’s coming tomorrow, I’ll ask her,” Marie said, and she shut the door again. Coba had already helped them often, she would know what to do with the clothes too.
Yes, Coba knew, of course, and so did Marie’s mother, and Leen and his friend Leo, who did all sorts of useful things for people in hiding. It could not be avoided — the narrow circle that Marie had imagined at first had been pierced. It happened practically on its own. And so did the other thing. It was unexpected — or maybe not, in the end, totally unexpected. Just a small event, but still a harbinger, an ambassador that the great event, the daily occurrence, had sent as a reminder, since it itself was almost invisible, as if happening between the lines. A wind that also blows in from the sea during the summer, just a little fuller now, and more biting, so that you shiver a little, a cloud that it brings along when September comes, outlined a little more sharply and not so shining and transparent anymore. Or like a faint illness, hardly worth going to bed for, which has already welcomed death into the house.
The three of them had lived together for five months already, wary and often tense, but still, it was normal life. Like every group where one person is dependent on the others, it straightens itself out and finds the guiding star under which everyone can live together.
“He’d rather eat upstairs today,” Marie said, still a bit disturbed by what had happened. She poured the thick pea soup into the deep soup plate and put it on the tray, where a glass of water was already standing.
Wim quietly lifted up his own still empty plate, weighed it gently with his fingertips, and then put it carefully down again on the table, a little farther to the left.
Then Marie brought the meal to his room.