3. Interrogation

He had taken the road to Heerenveen only a few times before; to be precise, three times. The first time was when he had gone there to make an arrangement with Poepjes, the commercial fisherman. He had taken the tram to Heerenveen and had walked the rest of the way. Poepjes hadn’t asked much money for the business, so they had come to an agreement quickly. He’d paid only three hundred guilders for the old shack on the edge of the lake. Two weeks later they had been on the road to the new place with horse and wagon. Their handful of personal belongings, along with Gryt and the boy, fit easily on one wagon.

The third time he had traveled this road had been for the funeral of his father. They had lived by the lake hardly three months then. They had never been worse off because he had to learn everything from scratch and he caught but little. Besides, eel didn’t bring much money in those days.

They had not let him know that the old man was sick. He only received a postcard from Hindrik that his dad would be buried on Saturday. He had attended, though he knew what they thought of him in Beets. When they emptied out the house and divided the stuff, Thomas asked about Dad’s muzzle-loader.

He wanted it.

“What do you want with that,” said Thomas, “you have a hunter’s permit.”

They meant his fishing license. He wasn’t a poacher anymore, so he wouldn’t dare use the muzzle-loader anyway. But in the end, he did get to take it home with him.

Before he took that job by the polder, he had tried talking it over with his dad. The old man had lost much of his wildness and was easier to get along with now. Sometimes he could even have a decent conversation.

He said to the old man: “It’s easy enough for Hindrik and Thomas to talk. They have healthy kids and they’ll roll through it easy enough, but for us it’s always tough going. I’ve gotta have a steady job, otherwise we’re not gonna make it.”

Dad said: “If you’re gonna become a slave driver in the polder, then I’m all through with you.”

He also said that it didn’t make sense to him at all. “Hindrik’s wife Geeske is nothing but a scurvy skeleton. There’s hardly any flesh on her and she’s as flat as a pancake. But healthy as a spring chicken and every year another baby. You married yourself a hulk of a woman and you have only one child, and that one is always sick.”

Hindrik often said that Gryt was a whiner. “You have to be firm with her. And that boy of yours, he’s not gonna amount to anything either.”

They had been wrong about the boy. No one could tell now that as a baby he had been sickly.

The German on the back of the motorcycle sat with his head down deep in the collar of his overcoat and sought shelter behind the back of his mate. They paid no attention to him. They had pulled the tarp tightly around him. He couldn’t move an inch.

The vehicle hobbled over the rough cobblestone road. They crossed the tracks and then followed the canal in the direction of Leeuwarden. That disappointed him. He had thought they were heading for Crackstate.

He felt at home there. He knew about the place already as a boy, from his father’s stories. Later Hindrik and Thomas added their tall tales. Dad said that he couldn’t count the times he’d been there to sit out his punishment.

He knew nothing about Leeuwarden and it scared him a little. The big jail was there, but if you ended up there it would be for a couple of years and not for a couple of weeks or months, as in Crackstate.

He was also getting cold, though it was nice sunny weather. The people they saw along the way in the fields had taken off their coats, but the motorcycle rode fast and the wind blew so hard in his face that the tears were running down his cheeks.

On the other side of Irnsum—he saw the name on a sign—the soldier who drove shouted something to his mate and the cycle slowed. The soldier drove onto the shoulder of the road and they got off. They lit cigarettes and took a leak by a tree. He’d like to get out too; his legs were stiff and his stomach hurt from all the bumping.

He asked: “Can I get out too?”

They didn’t understand him at first and he made the gestures for relieving himself. When that didn’t help, he said it in German. They untied the tarp and told him not to try to escape. One soldier took his rifle off his back and put it under his arm. He walked around a bit on stiff legs and then relieved himself behind a tree. Then the soldiers snuffed their cigarettes and told him to get back in.

Twice in his life he had been to Leeuwarden. He best remembered his trip there as a boy, with Dad and Thomas and a whole bunch of people from Beets and Terwispel. It must have been a Sunday, because they didn’t have to work and there was no strike either. He could still clearly recall the large meadow surrounded by a hedge of police and soldiers. He must have been about eleven then and was already working with the other boys inside the big mudscoop.

He remembered nothing of the speeches, but the scene of the police and the soldiers standing silent in a circle was vividly etched in his memory. He remembered the trip home as well, because Dad had to keep prodding him. He could hardly keep up with the group that walked along the road, in serious discussion about the meeting they had attended. Now and then they’d break out into singing their fight song, the “Marianne.” And around Akkrum, Dad and the others ran into a gang from Terwispel. Dad wanted to stop for a drink, but one guy from Terwispel blocked his way and screamed: “Workers who drink don’t think, and workers who think don’t drink.” That made Dad angry and he knocked the man out of his way.

The motorcycle crossed a pair of bridges and turned into a wide street. They stopped, but there was no prison. It looked more like a manor house with a high iron fence and a large garden with beautiful flowers and footpaths winding through it. Such mansions one might see only in Beetsterzwaag.

The door looked like a gateway, so wide and high, with steps leading up to it. A soldier stood on guard duty by the gate, and another one by the door. Behind the door was a long corridor just as in the town hall, but much wider and higher and with brown doors on both sides as far down as one could see.

One soldier stayed with him, the other disappeared behind a door. He soon returned and took him down the corridor into a bare room with a couple of benches. One soldier seated himself by the door, the other left.

He was there for maybe less than fifteen minutes. He unbuttoned his jacket, because it was a bit stuffy in the room.

Then the soldier took him to the end of the corridor and around the corner. He was led into a room where there was only one man sitting behind a huge desk. He was half hidden from view behind a palm. The room had large windows with awnings. He had never seen such an impressive room; there were no such rooms in Crackstate and in the Hall of Justice and the City Hall in Beetsterzwaag. The ceiling was white and decorated with figurines. Chandeliers with more than twenty bulbs and adorned with beads and copper hung from the ceiling. In the corner stood a statue of a nude, also in white, one knee slightly raised and one hand behind her neck.

The wallpaper was dark red with gold flowers and there were many large paintings on the wall. The carpet on the floor was so thick that he could feel his feet sink into it.

He stood in the middle of the room, in his boots, and the door closed behind him. The man behind the desk was not in uniform and he did not speak German.

He said: “So, there you are.”

He came around the desk and pointed to a couple of empty chairs.

“Sit down. Maybe you want to take your coat off. It’s a bit warm.” The sun was right on the windows and the awnings didn’t nearly keep all the heat out.

He was a good-looking man with a nice gray suit and shoes that shone like a mirror.

He let himself down in the low, leather chair and the man sat down on the other side of the low coffee table. There were cigarettes in a wooden container, and the man took one himself and then held the box out to him. “Go ahead, take one.”

“I would like some chewing tobacco.”

“That’s fine, but I have no chewing tobacco and I can’t offer you a spittoon, either.”

He said it smiling. “My grandfather chewed also. It’s going out of style a bit, though, isn’t it. My father did it now and again, but my mother hated it. He was a common laborer too, just like you. He worked for a farmer for forty-five years. He had a hard life, just like all the workmen of his time. He didn’t get old; the poor man never experienced the better times.”

He got up and took some papers off his desk.

He could swear that the brown-covered folder was the same one the mayor had in front of him this morning.

The man sat down and lay the open dossier on his lap. He said: “And do you know what grieves me the most about my father? That he never understood it. Till his last day he gave all he had for the SDLP. He was a fanatical party member. He believed everything the party leaders told him. He never knew how he got screwed.”

He got up to reach for the telephone on the desk, which had already rung twice, and listened. He said: “Let me check.”

He paged through other papers lying on the desk. Then he said: “No, just send those on to Mayer.”

He sat down again and took the folder from the table.

“Where were we?”

He crossed his legs and started looking through the file.

“Oh yes, my father, a fanatical socialist. Were you brought up like that too?”

He considered how he should respond. He was thrown off a little because he was used to different treatment. They would usually start right in on him. Once in a while there would be one who would start with a friendly conversation, but they would never allow him to sit down.

He said: “I never belonged to a party.”

“That’s sensible, but you’ve been pretty active nevertheless, though it may not be in politics. I didn’t read the reports all that carefully, to be honest, but when I look at …”

He began to scan the pages. “For example, you don’t get fourteen months for nothing. That’s not for riding your bike without lights. And then there’s one for three months, one for four weeks, and a whole row of shorter sentences.”

He should have known. At every opportunity he was reminded of his sins, and the longer the list, the heavier the punishment. That criminal record would haunt him his whole life.

“That was in another time,” he said, “but for the last five years I’ve stayed out of trouble, as you can tell from those papers.”

The man dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Of course, I understand. If I had lived in that time, I likely would have done the same. So much injustice demands resistance. I can’t stand injustice, I’ve always been that way.”

He didn’t quite know what to make of it.

“Are you a church member?”

He read in the dossier again. “I believe not, right? Of course not.”

“I am nothing,” he said.

“You come from a fairly anarchistic background.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I often heard my dad talk about Domela, that’s true.”

“The great Domela Nieuwenhuis, of course. Did you know him?”

“No, but when I was a little boy he would often come to Beets and Terwispel, and he is supposed to have been in our home too. They were proud of Domela in Beets.”

“Did your family always live in that area?”

“I think so. They would move sometimes, from Terwispel to Beets, when all the peat had been dug up there. But Grampa came from Giethoorn, I’ve heard; a lot of folk in Beets came from there, you could tell that from their dialect. When the peat was gone in Overijsel, they came this way. They knew only how to make turf, so they had to go where the work was.”

“And all of them Domela followers, of course.”

“I suppose so, at least in my time. But I believe that quite a few of them first belonged to the Mennonite Church.”

He said what he knew and that wasn’t much. They rarely talked about it at home. Besides, he wanted to be cautious, for he didn’t yet know what the man was up to. It was probably just a warm-up.

The man questioned him more closely, and then he told the story he had often heard his dad tell. That Grampa one day walked away from the meal table because he refused to read from the Bible.

“Did he have to be the one to read?”

“He was the only one who could read a little. A schoolteacher who took an interest in him must have taught him. But I think that teacher must have taught him something else as well.”

The old man liked to talk big. He didn’t believe that it had actually happened this way, but according to Dad, Grampa must have said: The hell with it, and if that book appears on this table one more time, I will leave.

“His folks didn’t want to give it up, of course.”

“No, so he never came home again.”

The telephone rang again and the man talked for quite a while.

He looked at the slate-blue sky. He was getting warm and he loosened the top button of his shirt. It was uncomfortable sitting in that low chair. He sank too deeply into it and he didn’t know what to do with his legs.

“Give me a quarter of an hour and I’ll be through with him,” said the man, and hung up. He stayed behind the desk, picked up a pencil, and softly tapped the desk with it.

He said: “I’m trying to figure out what kind of a man you are. You are not a terrorist; you are too sensible for that. You have seen too much and experienced too much to let yourself be egged on by that clique in London, the so-called government in exile that never moved a finger on your behalf. Now they need you, but you know better. Am I right?”

“I have nothing to do with anything.”

“I’d like to believe that. But it’s possible that you don’t do anything to obstruct the underground either, do you?”

The man came from behind his desk and continued: “When you are on the lake fishing and airplanes fly over and drop weapons, then you look the other way.”

He noticed that the man’s tone had changed and that he was looking at his watch.

“It never caught my attention.”

“No, I suppose not, but if you should happen to see it, what would you do?”

He would rather have sat on a higher chair. He felt himself powerless with his legs folded almost double.

“Well, what do you say?”

“I’ve never witnessed that, so it is hard for me to say what I would do.”

“You’re avoiding the question.” He looked at his watch again. “I don’t have much time. You’re not as innocent as I first thought. I regret that, for your sake. It doesn’t make any difference to me, of course; it’s a small trick to get people to confess. If we chose, you would tell us everything within an hour. But I prefer not to take that route, and I thought that with you it wouldn’t be necessary either.”

“I don’t know what you want me to confess,” he answered. “I already told the mayor this morning. I was home the whole night.”

The man bounced up. “How do you know that it was this past night?”

“I gathered that. The mayor said it himself, and there were more in attendance: the water police and an officer and a regular policeman.

“I warn you that this won’t do you any good. Wait, let me make it easy for you. I will tell you how it went, and you need to do nothing else but confirm the story. Shall we do it that way?”

An answer was expected of him. He said: “I didn’t notice anything, so I can’t say yes or no.”

“Your son told us.”

It came as a shock. He was going to get up, but he couldn’t manage from that low chair. He managed to control himself, but uneasiness followed. He looked at the man, who kept a close eye on him, and then at the desk. He said nothing. He knew that the interrogation would now go the way he was used to, and that he would have to watch his words. It was worse now than before, because now the boy was involved. He felt himself begin to tremble inside when he thought about the boy. It started with a shiver that ran across his skin. He was scared.

“He told us everything,” said the man after a short silence. “He’s a lot like you. He reacted the same way. I told him the same thing. I wanted to help him because I don’t believe he’s bad. He was talked into it, of course, we see that happen more often. I am prepared to go easy on him. But he refused at first, so I had to send him on. I felt sorry for him when he came back in here again and confessed everything. I warned him too, just like I’m warning you now. He …”

“What did you do with him?”

It was the first time he had interrupted the man.

“We made him confess; just how that’s done you will find out yourself if you refuse to cooperate. No one ever came away from here who ultimately didn’t tell us the truth. There’s nobody too tough for us to break.”

He began to remember now the stories he had heard from the people in hiding. Cor, the one from Amsterdam, knew all about it, he said. And the girl knew the same kind of stories. But all of them had it secondhand. There were so many stories floating around about the Germans. He felt the rise of dread and uncertainty, and he saw the demons that had tormented him when the boy was still small. He heard him squeak and gasp in the cupboard bed next to them when the boy suffered from chest congestion, and he saw the boy’s fear on his first day of school.

For fifteen years he had worried about the boy; then he turned the corner and was able to take care of himself pretty well. But at this moment the anxiety returned and slashed through his chest.

The man must be able to tell by looking at him. He said, “I want to help both of you, and there’s a lot I can do for you, but then you have to help us. We’ve got to take care of that underground business in your area. I want the names of the leaders and then you have my word that you will be home again tonight.”

“My boy too?”

“Your son too.”

There was a knock on the door and the man looked at his watch. He hurried to the door and talked with somebody in the hall. When he closed the door behind him again, he said: “I don’t have any more time. There are other people I can probably still help.”

He sat down behind the desk and picked up a pencil. “Shall we?”

“What did you want to know?”

“I want to know everything.”

“But you already know everything.”

He said it innocently and he had wanted to add something, but the man didn’t give him the chance. He jumped up and shouted: “This has gone on long enough. I’m not going to waste any more time on you. Confess, and at once.”

But he was not that far yet. He felt himself grow more composed and then his irritability returned, too.

The man banged the table with his fist and screamed: “I’ll get it out of you all right and then the whole lot of you will be lined up against the wall. And we’re going to burn down that terrorist nest of yours with everything in it. We’ve cleaned up more of those resistance dens.”

He began to breathe easier when he saw the man raging that way. He should have known; they always tried and it had never affected him. The reason that he had gotten off the track a bit this time was only because of the boy. But they didn’t have him; he was certain that they hadn’t caught Germ. He said: “Did he confess everything, about those resistance dens and all that?”

He felt the impulse to laugh, which had always infuriated the police.

The man was going to come at him, but he restrained himself. With large strides he rushed to the door and tore it open.

“Get this one out of here,” he hollered.

A German soldier took him through the corridor in the opposite direction of the entrance, down a small concrete stairway and then through a narrow hallway with small barred ceiling lights. The soldier opened a door and gestured for him to enter. He stood in a cell and saw that he was not alone.

“Well, I’m getting company. That’s nice. I’ve been here all by myself for days already.”

It was a man in a brown corduroy suit. The elbows and the knees of the suit were shiny and the area around the fly was greasy. The man’s face was wrinkled and his hair was short and gray.

He asked: “Do they keep them long here?”

Then he heard what he had been afraid of all along. The man said: “Whoever gets in here may never get out.”