‘I was not involved in a fight in Houtstraat. You must have seen someone else. Where could I have changed, anyway?’
Evert slapped him on the shoulder and laughed.
They travelled back to Voorschoten together.
* * *
That night Osewoudt could not sleep for the cramp in his left hand. From the moment he ran into the chemist’s son he had not dared transfer the towel with the pistol in it to his other hand.
For a whole week he thought almost continually of Dorbeck, hoping to hear from him. But Dorbeck did not turn up, nor were there any messages or notes. Not a word about the incident in the newspapers either. He racked his brains for some way of getting in touch with Dorbeck, but couldn’t think of anything safe enough to try.
One Sunday night he finally had an idea. He remembered the roll of film Dorbeck had given him when they first met, that day in May when the Germans invaded. It was still in the drawer under the counter, undeveloped. He went down to the cellar and fetched out the developer and the fixing salt left over from his first attempt. It was a film that could be developed in red light, the label said, so this time it worked. All at once pictures appeared on the wet celluloid. He saw:
a big snowman with a helmet and a rifle
three soldiers wearing gas masks, their arms round each other, in pyjamas
a blurred image of someone who had moved during the exposure
a bare-chested soldier manning an anti-aircraft gun
another botched photo — several superimposed images.
The last one was a snap of Dorbeck standing in a street with his arms around two girls. It was so sharp that he could make out the number of the house behind them: 32. Naturally he thought of the address Kleine Houtstraat 32. He held the film up to the lamp for a closer look.
KLEINE HOUT he read at the edge, with some difficulty as the letters were in reverse. But it was the same house on the corner, there was no doubt about it.
He cut the film into manageable lengths, laid them in the fixing bath, and was still holding the section with the picture of the house when the door opened and the electric light was switched on. It was his mother, in one of her strange get-ups. She gave him such a shock that he did not call out, only went up to her with the negative still in his hand. She stood halfway down the steps, draped in a sheet, with a hat folded from newspaper on her head. She said she could feel it again and had come to scare it away. She pointed to the red oil lamp and asked what he was holding. ‘Nothing,’ he said, looking down at the negative, and then he saw it had turned quite black. He put it in the fixing bath, switched off the light and took his mother up to bed. He lifted the witch’s cap off her head and screwed it up into a ball. When she was under the covers she began to sob, saying she couldn’t do anything for him now. Then she had an attack of the hiccups. He tried giving her water, but that didn’t help. Ria called ‘What are you up to?’ but didn’t venture upstairs. Moorlag was out. The doctor came, but achieved little. All night his mother was kept awake by the hiccups. He crawled into bed beside her. As he couldn’t sleep anyway, he got up every half-hour to look at the negative, in case something of an image had been saved after all. But the next morning, inspecting it for the last time, there was nothing, not even when he held it up to the sun; no house number, no Dorbeck and no girlfriends. The other shots were all right, and he made a set of prints of them.
At the end of August he read in the newspaper that a plane had been shot down in flames over Amsterdam. It had fallen on Legmeerplein, where it had completely destroyed one building and started fires in three others.
Osewoudt went to Amsterdam the same day. He took Dorbeck’s photos with him.
The explosion must have been huge. Glass crunched under his feet as he approached the square, curtains flapped in the windows. Furniture, some of it charred, had been stacked in the middle of the road, which was closed to traffic.
He began to take note of the house numbers: 21, 23, 25. All that was left of number 25 was the porch.
‘Excuse me madam, do you happen to know if there were many casualties?’
‘Twelve dead, sir. The Jagtman family on the third floor, all of them dead. And then there’s old Mrs Sevensma, and …’
On his return home he put away the photos in a safe place, as a memento of the only man he had ever admired.
The next few weeks he kept hoping, and dreading, that something would happen, or that someone, maybe Zéwüster, would get in touch, but these thoughts, too, evaporated, and in the years that followed it was as if the war simply faded from his existence.
In his left hand he held the sign he had just unwrapped: a smart plaque, made of some sort of ruby-red artificial glass. Painted on it were the words: EMPTY PACKAGING.
In his right hand he held the receipt for the sum of twelve guilders and fifty cents, dated 28 June, 1944. A reasonable price.
He went over to the window and slid aside the half-curtain that served as a backdrop for the display. Leaning forward carefully over the artful arrangement of empty cigar boxes, tobacco pouches and cigarette packets, he reached for the old card with the same inscription, grimy after three years propped in the window.
As he strained to reach it, head down, he had a vague sense of someone passing back and forth outside the window. He looked up, but saw no one. Yet he was sure there had been someone there, and also that they hadn’t paused to look in the window before walking on in the same direction.
Straightening up again, he looked outside. But all he saw was the milkman on his delivery bike across the street, pedalling backwards to brake.
Osewoudt put the old card on the counter. Turning back to the display window, he noticed a brown envelope lying on the doormat.
He ran to the door and out on to the pavement, setting off the electric bell. There was no one hurrying away. He stopped for a moment and waved to the milkman. Once more he looked up and down the street, but there was no one who could have dropped off the envelope within the last minute.
What do I care, he thought, went back into the shop and opened the envelope.
It contained a white slip of paper bearing a message: Have you developed my photos yet? Send them to PO Box 234, The Hague. Regards, Dorbeck.
The entire message was typewritten, including the name at the end.
Osewoudt went to the post in time to catch the early mail collection, carrying an envelope in his hand. At the letter box he took a final look at the three snapshots in the envelope:
a snowman with a helmet and a rifle
three soldiers in pyjamas and gas masks
one bare-chested soldier in pyjama trousers manning an anti-aircraft gun.
Osewoudt checked the adjustable number on the letter box: 3, signifying yesterday’s last mail collection. He slid the pictures back into the envelope, stuck it down and pushed it through the slit.
Just before five that afternoon he entered the main post office in The Hague. Looking constantly about him, he sauntered towards the wall of post-office boxes. Almost immediately he spotted the small metal door with the number 234. He waited.
There was the usual post-office fug of damp sacking, drying ink and endless yearning, but it seemed to him that he smelled it for the first time. From outside came the clanging of tram signals and the afternoon sunlight shafting into the airless, twilit space.
There were other people besides him waiting for the last delivery. Some went straight to their box, key in hand, removed a small batch of letters and vanished.
By quarter past five Osewoudt was the only person left.
Maybe there’s been a hitch and now Dorbeck can’t come, Osewoudt thought, maybe he wants me to stick around near the post-office boxes for a couple of days until we manage to meet.