Nine
A succession of rooms, visited only briefly, sometimes for a night, sometimes for a week. They blur into one another, present only in fleeting memories, such as that of an afternoon spent staring upward at the sunshine framing the edges of a blackout blind. Lien makes no decisions, loses self-awareness for hours, but she is not afraid. Everywhere there are new routines to follow: where to wash, when and what to eat, how to eat, where to sleep. On the first night away from the Van Es family she stays with Mrs. de Bruyne’s daughter, just a few streets away from the Bilderdijkstraat. When she gets to the camp bed in the upstairs bedroom there is a bag containing her clothes and a few belongings, but no word of what has happened or what is planned. Lien asks no questions. She eats when she is supposed to eat and sleeps when she is told it is bedtime. For the rest, time drifts past without her really noticing it; the people—whether kind and gentle, nervous, or resentful—meld into one.
Lien no longer goes to school and hardly ever sees other children. At first she misses Auntie, Kees, Ali, and Marianne and cries when she thinks of them, but quite soon they—like everything else—lose focus in her memory. They are shapes at the edge of her field of vision toward which she will not turn her gaze. Mrs. Heroma, though, is still a presence. She is spoken of in whispers as a great personage by adults and sometimes she even comes to a front room to collect Lien and take her onward to a new house.
At one point Mrs. Heroma takes Lien to her own home, where she lives with her husband the doctor. It is bigger than the other houses she has been in, even though she sees it only very briefly from the outside—pressed, as she was the first time they met, into the folds of Mrs. Heroma’s coat. Lien stays in an empty room above the surgery, from where she hears the patients coming and going, the moms chatting on the pavement over the tops of their prams.
Dr. Heroma is always busy. She hears his bass voice, but not the words he speaks, sounding out, muffled, through the floorboards every ten minutes as he opens the door to his consulting room and calls the next patient inside. Occasionally she hears the rattle of his keys as he closes the front door of the surgery, followed by his quick steps and the clunk of a car door. The engine trying to start sounds like a kind of laughter that won’t get going: He, he, he, he—he. He, he, he, he—he. Then, at the third attempt, it nearly catches, and on the fourth it does, almost straightaway turning to a weak and then a strong pitter-patter, pitter-patter, pitter-patter. For a short while it stays there while the engine establishes its rhythm, then the pitch of the pitter-patter goes higher and moves off down the street and fades away.
Mrs. Heroma is more strict during the time that Lien is staying with her. Lien has to be absolutely still on the sofa upstairs. Elsewhere in the house there are other people, but she never sees them. On the drying rack that stands in the room in front of her there is laundry, women’s clothing, which does not belong to Mrs. Heroma. Sometimes in the night there is movement. The front door opens and then shuts with a tiny click that echoes in the silence. In the darkness Lien often lies awake with nothing but blackness in front of her eyes.
She keeps on being moved from one house to another. Whenever Lien feels sleep press in upon her, at night or on some empty afternoon while gazing at floorboards, she fills her mind with pictures and flies high over the buildings to the places where she used to play. She is Goeie Lientje (Good Lien) when she can do this flying and carries out little miracles in a world of familiar faces where the rules are not the same. She rescues animals and people and explains things to everyone without having to think at all about what to say. All the time there is that flying feeling, a kind of swimming through the air that she feels even when her feet are on the ground. Strange waves make her feel unsteady but she knows that all will be well.
There is also a Kwaaie Lientje (Bad Lien or Angry Lien) who cannot fly and who seems to wade slowly through an invisible tar. Sometimes Kwaaie Lientje does not move forward at all and just drifts backward on the stream of stickiness, however hard she tries. Kwaaie Lientje goes with Hansje to the animal graveyard they have made together. There they take the creatures that are dead or dying and carry them to graves so deep down in the earth that the bottom cannot be seen. As for the animals that are still living, Kwaaie Lientje helps them on their way, feeling the crack of their little bones as she holds them in her grip. Goeie Lientje or Kwaaie Lientje, she feels herself shifting from one to the other—from good to bad or angry—as she stares into the blankness while empty hours go by.
AT LAST, the people who determine these things make a decision: Lien must go away from Dordt. So here she stands, dressed and ready, in another upstairs bedroom, waiting for another person to collect her and take her to a new place. The bell rings, but Lien knows not to answer and waits patiently behind the closed door. There are feet on the stairs and then suddenly a voice that is familiar, loud even when she is trying to whisper. It is Auntie. Lien does not rush out to embrace her but instead remains timidly where she is standing, one leg curled behind the other, waiting to be hugged. A familiar smell envelops her, the soft heaviness of arms pressing downward, and a floating sensation, her feet dangling as she is pulled upward to Auntie’s ruddy cheek. It is the first time that somebody has touched her in many weeks.
But there is no time for greetings, and anyway, this is not a reunion. Auntie will take her on the back of her bike to a new place where she will be safe. A few words are spoken that do not really register, about everyone being well back at home in the Bilderdijkstraat, and moments later Lien is sitting sidesaddle on the baggage rack of Auntie’s bicycle, looking out in the early morning on the familiar streets of Dordt. It is a Saturday, she thinks, or at least there are no schoolchildren, just a few men who walk with their heads down, stepping quickly on their way to work. At first it looks as if Auntie is heading to Granny and Grandpa’s in Strien, because once they are out of the city there are the same dark, flat, empty fields decked with mist. But riding up on the silent dike road, high above the land, they take the opposite direction, heading southwest.
After a while they ride beside the gray expanse of the Oude Maas River. A few barges that sit upon it struggle against the stream toward Dordrecht, creating small white waves around their bows and a yellowish wash behind. The barges are so heavily laden that their decks stand just a foot or so above the water but they ride above the level of the land. Lien sits passively looking outward while Auntie pedals without varying her pace. Auntie’s legs move rhythmically upward and downward, upward and downward, just like the steam train that took Lien away from her home in The Hague. Spring sunshine clears the fog from the fields that stretch below to one side of them. The birds are singing. They pass through villages with tall redbrick houses where there are mothers queuing for bakeries and children playing in the street. Auntie cycles onward. In her mind’s eye Lien magically begins to fly above the scene.
The journey is broken up when they cross the river on a ferry boat—a proper one like you get in books, with a funnel belching coal smoke that you can taste on your tongue, a deck with ventilation ports, and a real captain in a uniform on the bridge. It is almost like crossing an ocean, feeling the engine thump away below you as you run from one side of the boat to the other and then stand at the bow like a lookout watching the approaching shore. There are two other children on the boat: a bigger girl of ten and her brother, aged eight. Lien fits right in between them and soon they are Nile explorers, watching out for attackers, weapons at the ready. Here, out on the river, the breeze is stronger—blowing hair around your face and into your mouth. After weeks of solitary existence, in the sunshine Lien suddenly comes alive.
But now the sound from the engine changes and all too soon there is a squeak of wood against metal as the ferry bumps against a jetty and the mooring ropes are thrown. Almost at once the gates open and they cycle on, plunged again into the emptiness of the flatland, which is disturbed only by the regular crisscross of ditches and dikes. After the momentary animation of being with the other children, Lien drifts back to her dreamworld, hardly registering where they go. The day is warm, almost summery, and as time passes the air that surrounds them becomes heavy with the fragrant damp that rises from the earth. To Lien, who is sitting so uncomfortably with her legs dangling, it feels like a long journey, but it is still morning when Auntie finally stops.